I just finished The Wives by Simone Gorrindo. This is a realistic chronicle of the life of a military spouse when a spouse is a member of an elite unit, deployed most of the time. It's an honest look at a life in which your spouse can be deployed with 24 hours notice. You have no idea where they are in the world. There is little or no communication. These spouses pray that they won't see a strange car in the driveway as the notification unit comes to let them know that their spouse is gone.

I would highly recommend this title to all readers.

In the interest of full disclosure, I received a free digital copy of this book from Net Galley.

#TheWives#SimoneGorrindo#NetGalley

Wow! This is an insightful book about the lives of army wife’s. Simone’s telling of her tale transitioning into army life from civilian life. The ups and downs when her husband I’d deployed to Afghanistan. Her interaction with the other army wives. The heartbreaks, fears and joys. The impact on all of their family mental and emotional lives. Very good read. Must read. I was given an advanced reader copy of this very well written book by NetGalley and I am freely sharing my review.

The Wives was a wonderful book full of nuance and insight to the world of military wives. With many military wife friends, it was helpful to better understand the deep trust and connection formed by people in the same or similar circumstances. Simone is a wonderful storyteller who I was rooting for throughout the book.

I received an advanced copy of The Wives from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was really interested to read this book considering I've had relatives in the military, but never someone as closely connected as a spouse. This was a fascinating look into the life of a woman who never wanted to be a military spouse and how her husband's choice to join the military impacted her and their relationship. While the various military wives that Simone meets and befriends play a major role in the book, I do feel like the later chunk of the book was more about her relationship with her husband and how they worked through their marital disagreements. While I wish the wives had played an even bigger role, I still found myself enjoying the book overall.

I was excited to read this book as I have been a military spouse for 18.5 years and was a military brat. My husband was former Army who wanted to go to Ranger school but ended up swapping to AF. I wanted to learn what the life was like. It was not at all what I expected. It wasn’t a look into what the lives are like as much as a long list of complaints about her issues with the military, the wives, and America.

Unfortunately the author comes off extremely anti-American (to the point she makes the comment about the flag bothering her) and her liberal ideology is woven throughout the book.

The book starts off with some background info into her life. She grew up in California and ends up moving to New York. Her and her husband had known each other from California and he tells her he’d pick the Army over her. They go to couple therapy where she decides she does love him enough to follow him. They have a court wedding and move to GA where she is immediately thrown into Army life and he is deployed.

She talks about how Rachel her neighbor and her become immediate friends. This is typical military spouse life. You move and you find friends immediately who become closer than family in many cases because they’re the ones there for you during the rough times when the spouses are gone. I felt like she did a good job with explaining what it is like to be thrown into the military lifestyle especially as an outsider; unfortunately, that’s about where the good ends.

What bothered me so much though was she begins to air the wives secrets. Clearly she doesn’t know the unwritten spouse rules because I’d never be okay with someone airing things I’d told them about marital problems, squadron issues, just life. I’m hoping she got permission to share for example how one of the men in the unit was verbally abusive after drinking too much. Or how another wife wrote papers for her husband for college (I’m waiting for him to get into trouble for plagiarism and his career to be over) because the military has decided that in addition to their insane training schedule and deployment rotation they need to get a college degree. These were just a few of the examples of airing others dirty laundry.

My other issue was how she sees enlisted wives. She says at one point speaking about officers’ wives, “I had more in common with them than enlisted wives. An obvious shared cultural experience was college…. We’d grown up, most of us, in leafy suburbs and midsized cities with bookstores and a decent collection of restaurants, not rural, 3,000 person towns…” First off, I’m an officer wife whose dad was enlisted. My parents were not college educated but we did live in large towns. Once my dad got out we spent the majority of my childhood between Seattle and California. My parents had grown up in the Seattle area. She again makes a comment, “Sometimes, I wondered if the officer wives looked at me the same way. The wife of an enlisted man? Must be an interim gig. Way too smart.” This is so pretentious. She acts like the average enlisted wife is a dumb bimbo who is barefoot and pregnant all of the time. I feel bad for the enlisted wives who read this. I know women who went to college and refuse to read a book. And I know people who never went to college who are smarter than college educated people. Another direct quote of hers, “every officer wife I’d met so far seemed well-bred in a way those kids from my high school had, like they’d probably grown up with dance lessons and summer camps and sweet notes in their lunch boxes.” Again, as an officer wife, I didn’t grow up with any of that. She has an extremely jaded view of the enlisted wives and these are just a few examples.

If she’s not complaining about the wives and their lack of education she’s complaining about the deployments. Yes, they’re hard. Yes they suck. She’s active duty and those wives are amazing about jumping in to help out. She does talk about how Rachel helped her as she massively struggled with anxiety and as someone who myself struggles with anxiety I could relate to her on this one issue. But I could not imagine literally moving in with someone else for months on end (what seemed to be the case) because of anxiety.

The one positive she talks about is mental health care. Her and her husband actually go to see a counselor which is huge especially in the SF community where they believe in taking care of things on their own.

If the book hadn’t had such a jaded view I still couldn’t give it a high rating. It jumped around quite often and felt very flat. Often, the only time she went into deep descriptions on people or places was when they were bad. I loved the show and book series “Army Wives” even if it wasn’t accurate because of how engaging it was. I thought this would be fun to read but instead she shoved her politics and anti religious views down my throat. At the end she even speaks to her husband’s disdain towards President Trump. While we have a president that we are completely opposed to now and weren’t huge Trump fans, I cannot imagine my husband or myself airing our blatant disrespect towards them. The president is their boss at the end of the day.

I asked other military spouses about some of these quotes and we all agreed they were out of line. Many said they would absolutely not pay to read this book.

I saved a ton of quotes please feel free to read through them.

I enjoyed this book for many reasons. The main one being that Simone is an incredible author. Her writing is smart and beautiful and witty and fluent.

However, my rating is stuck at three stars because I found her prose of a military wife to be … illogical. That might not be fair to her and I won’t pretend that her book allowed me a front row seat to her marriage in its entirety but I didn’t understand half of the things she was so upset about throughout the book.

This is a very good, well written autobiographical account of Simone Gorrindo’s first few years as that disposable commodity, an Army wife. Yes, disposable, because if the Army wanted you to have a family … most of you know how the rest of that goes. If you don't, Gorrindo explains it at some halfway point or another. And if you still don’t, then you are an example of something that Gorrindo didn’t intend to expose, probably doesn’t know that she did: the loss of the country’s military tradition.

What? you say, what loss? We’re still fighting wars and throwing troops willy and nilly about the world. Yes, we certainly are, but not in the same manner we did for hundreds of years and not for the same reasons. We don’t send our army anymore; we deploy specialized units. We do not defeat an enemy; we contain a situation. These are the wars Eisenhower warned us about in his military-industrial complex speech. And the sense of national pride and regard that Americans used to hold for the military in general has devolved into a bare toleration, an “I suppose” view of military activity and its personnel.

This comes out rather clearly in Gorrindo’s book, especially for us boomers of the 50s and 60s, who still hold that traditional respect. Our parents fought in WW2. Their parents fought in WW1. We heard all the stories, saw the old medals and put-away uniforms, and sensed that shared but silent camaraderie whenever the old folks got together. We kept that respect in the face of Vietnam and other missteps because we knew it wasn’t the Army’s fault, it was feckless politicians and them damned hippies. And then the wars sort of dwindled into nothing more than a police action here and there or that ridiculous walkover of Desert Storm and we didn’t need to think about it anymore. We’d won.

Then the Towers fell.

So gear up the Army and march to … where? Fight who? Okay, turn Afghanistan into a parking lot, Iran and Iraq, too, and then what? We didn’t know, and the war turned into a series of deployments by specialized units to specific locations to conduct specific missions. It was like commandos during WW2 going out to sink Nazi battleships at anchor, just one action within a larger one, except we don’t know what the larger one is anymore.

Gorrindo’s husband, Andrew, leaves an affluent position in New York City at a rather advanced age - for an army grunt - to go fight the barbarians and salute, man, you are hard core. He becomes one of those deployed fighters in a specialized unit, a squared away righteous man with the righteous attitude except maybe he cries too much. Suck it up, man, rub some dirt on it. Simone is his fiancee and she is not for this at all, not at all, is downright appalled. I mean, why would you leave the cushiness of some comfortable job with guaranteed promotions in an affluent location surrounded by friends with the politically correct sophisticated views of culture and life to risk life and limb?

I get it. The rest of us who served do, too. But we are a fast shrinking fraction of the population.

SImone doesn’t get it, especially when Andrew tells her that, if he has to choose between her and the Army, then they can say goodbye now. To give Simone credit, she loves him enough to marry into 'terra incognita:' the culture and traditions of the military wife, and follows him down to Ft. Benning, GA which, if any you have ever been there, is proof beyond a shadow of just how much she loves him.

But she doesn’t love the military, is baffled by it, suspicious, unsure why anyone would waste their lives in it. She holds the same unconscious contempt for the military that all of her sophisticated college educated friends do, a condescending, downright patronizing dismissal of the institution and its people. Of course only losers and Trump voters join the military, and she has the same sneering contempt for Trump that is dutifully required among her set, although she cannot provide any concrete reason for despising him. All that patriotism and individual rights and letting people make their own decisions instead of a paternal well knowing government of similarly educated persons as herself making the right decisions for the peasants, I guess.

She does love the wives, though, her fellow “dependents” sharing the misery of constant deployment, macho culture, the standard idiocies of military life, and the overall annoyance the military brass feels for the family. Her friends and not-so-friends are an excellent cross section of the various socioeconomic and cultural levels that end up as wives and families of soldiers. Gorrindo does an excellent job presenting their various stories and heartbreaks and triumphs as they deal with a murderous deployment schedule that leaves them more times alone in their substandard houses than with their husbands. It is the way of the warrior.

But there is a bit too much “what about me?” drifting around Gorrindo, which is the death knell of many a military marriage. I won’t say what happens. You need to read this because Gorrindo will surprise you. But she is an anthropologist reporting back to her fellow science society members on a primitive tribe she has encountered in the jungle. You can almost see her and her friends exchanging jaw-dropped expressions as she relates various aspects of the wives’ lives, from childbirth to book club meetings.

In her defense, Gorrindo questions many of her assumptions, tries to see it from both sides, even quotes that ‘rough men’ trope from Kipling. But she displays a bit of contempt for the rough men and the need for them, seeming to hold that tired adolescent view that rough men should just stop being rough men then we could all go back to our unicorns and merry-go-rounds.

It’s the same attitude the later ruling classes of Rome held towards their military. Until the Visigoths showed up.

I lived in a military family for more than 25 years. I really enjoyed this book. It was a fondly remembered blast from the past. Bravo!

Simone Gorrindo’s memoir THE WIVES is a fascinating peek at life on the homefront as military spouses cope with the unfathomable demands of a military deployment. It reads like a love letter not only to the friends who helped her through some especially grueling times, but also like a love letter to friendship itself. Gorrindo is a gorgeous writer who carries readers with her through each moment and emotion. I read the entire book in one sitting. I could not put it down.

A really good read that I did not want to put down until the book ended.The author did a really good job of making you feel like you were a military wife as you read each page. The pain and emotional suffering a wife faces while pregnant and her husband is serving our country. This book would make a great book club read. The discussion would be very interesting and informative. I really put the book down feeling like I had been informed of a lot of military issues.

I have never read anything about military wives so it was interesting to get a glimpse into what life is like for them. I have an acquaintance that is a military wife and know some of the hardships she has endured but don't know her well enough to know all of the hardships and emotions that accompany that life. I've always had a great deal of respect for these women, but now it's even deeper.

I don’t have much experience with the life of Military families, just from what I have read, and I this book is an open door to that world. Military spouses are a special group that deserve more recognition than they get. I learned a lot from this book, it was compelling and fascinating.

The Wives was an open memoir and an inside look at the life of an unlikely military wife and the military families whose spouses serve in the US Army. There were interesting parts of the book about the author’s background that made me sympathetic to her but that sympathy couldn’t carry me to get past her incredibly condescending attitude towards the other army wives. The entire time I was reading this book, I found myself cringing at the way she looked down at these women who were her supporters and community. She obviously felt superior to the women around her and her disdain for them made this a difficult read.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Before reading THE WIVES, I had never experienced reading about myself in a book. Unlike the author, I’m not a mother and I’m not even an Army wife (the title’s subject), but wow do we have almost every single other value in common. Simone was a writer and senior editor in New York City (my dream job) when her new husband decided to enlist. She was very anti-military because she was very anti-violence, but given the choice between life as she knew it and life as it could be with Andrew, she quit her job and followed him to Fort Benning. The *in-CRED-ible* amount of anxiety that followed as he went through (and re-went through) Ranger School, night jumps, other trainings, and multiple deployments to Afghanistan was breath-taking as Simone struggled to write, to sleep, to exist in a constant state of worry over her husband and in community with all the other wives left behind. As she points out multiple times, no, the wives were not the ones who went to war as part of a Special Operations Unit, but they nevertheless fought very real battles on the homefront—as lonely women and single mothers who lived every day in fear of their phones … of missing a call from their husbands and/or receiving a call from the commander that their husbands had been injured or worse. Extremely powerful, sympathetic, and pro-woman, THE WIVES considers all the nuances of living in a country where we’re free because of the brave. Thanks to the publisher for an ARC!

Simone Gorrindo's memoir, "The Wives," delves deeply into the dynamics of marriage, camaraderie, and community among a closely-knit circle of military spouses. Through her own experiences, Gorrindo provides a poignant account of her decision to leave her New York City career behind and accompany her enlisted husband to the unfamiliar territory of Columbus, Georgia. This narrative offers a compelling and personal exploration of these themes.

Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery/Scout Press for this ARC of The Wives by Simone Gorrindo.

I requested this book based upon the premise of what life is like as a mysterious military wife.

Simone initially makes a life for herself through writing but generally life as the wife of a soldier and Sergeant is an insular one. She and the wives are isolated together in a way that only fellow survivors or foreign expats can be.

The wives are bonded in sublimation as they make a life alongside each other in this new world with mostly-absent husbands. “The wives were the ones I breathed like air. Andrew’s presence in my life was far more precarious.”

The military is a cosmos unto itself, with its own laws and rules, spoken and un-. “It’s not wrong or right, it’s just different.”

The men seem to know what they are signing up for - they strive for the tribal connection and purpose of war - but the wives have to adapt to the periphery as they go. “People told us, from time to time, that we knew what we were ‘signing up for.’ But who really knows what she is signing up for?” Simone writes.

The military as an institution creates soldiers. It programs (willing) young men into automaton machines. Simone initially had no idea how much “the Army would own Andrew.”
Marriage seems a tenet of this existence, yet it seemed dichotomous in this memoir, how a private or Sargent had to become a military tool yet somehow also exist in the domestic realm. “Your whole fucking life is designed to keep me from actually knowing you,” says Simone to Andrew during a couples’ therapy session.

So much of familial intimacy comes from shared quotidian experience. “The whole purpose of sharing your life with another person might be for witnessing these moments together…
All the small moments that are made strange or disquieting or
beautiful when you see them with someone else.”
“Maybe that’s why this deployment felt so wrong,” Simone writes about Andrew’s planned deployment during her pregnancy, “‘You seeing this?’ I’d say, and he wouldn’t be there to answer.”
We the reader are now seeing it.

In the satisfying conclusion of Simone’s memoir she has again made a life for herself outside of “Andrew’s world.”

Four stars.

I really enjoy reading memoirs. This one was great in the detail of explaining the close relationships formed by wives in an army setting. Set in time of Afghanistan War, it showed how the wives of deployed members coped with stresses of war.

Thank you to NetGalley for this advance reader copy. I enjoyed this memoir "The Wives" by Simone Gorrindo. I liked how intimate she got about the lives of elite army wives. This subject was educational in just what army families have to go through. I am in awe of these men and the families they leave to do this life threating work. I myself know I could never do what these families do and have the utmost respect for them though I don't always agree with the subject of war, or fighting. I would recommend this book!

Thank you to NetGalley for this advance reader copy. Military life is a kind of a elite, but segregated world.. if you’re not military, you really don’t fit in but if you are military and you can mesh with others, it makes your life a lot easier. Simone discusses her life throughout the years and these facts are helpful for other is going through a similar situation. I live near a large base, and I see the women bonding with one another.. I appreciate all aspects of this book, and I learned a lot about military life. These women are courageous , possibly even more determined than their husbands who are out there battling for our country. The women are the ones that support these strong men, and this book tells you all about those struggles.

The Wives is SImone's story of her early married life and the life of an Army wife. The story has many flashbacks that explain how both Simone and her husband got to the present.

Simone's husband was a part of an elite group in the Army. and early in their marriage Simone is left alone in Georgia with other Army wives.

It is somewhat a coming of age story of accepting where and who you are. It was very obvious that Simone was not a fan of living in Georgia. As a Georgia resident, the negative tone against the south and conservatives in general was very obvious...however, it was her story.

Military spouses are certainly a group that deserve more recognition...they are at times being both parents and taking care of everything at home.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC.

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