Standard Deviation: ‘The best feel-good novel around’ Daily Mail
‘One of the funniest books you will ever read’ Daily Mail‘Standard Deviation is a marvel’ Kate Atkinson‘Looking for a blissful summer novel? Here it is’ Washington Post‘This is the beach book for summer 2017’ The Times‘Addictive reading’ Mail on Sunday‘A comic masterpiece’ ObserverA divinely funny novel about the challenges of a good marriage, the delight and heartache of raising children, and the irresistible temptation to wonder about the path not taken. This sensational debut will appeal to fans of David Nicholls, Nick Hornby, Nora Ephron and Lorrie Moore.Graham Cavanaugh’s second wife, Audra, is everything his first wife was not. She considers herself privileged to live in the age of the hair towel, talks non-stop through her epidural, labour and delivery, invites the doorman to move in and the eccentric members of their son’s Origami Club to Thanksgiving. She is charming and spontaneous and fun but life with her can be exhausting.In the midst of the day-to-day difficulties and delights of marriage and raising a child with Asperger’s, his first wife, Elspeth, reenters Graham’s life. Former spouses are hard to categorize – are they friends, enemies, old flames, or just people who know you really, really well? Graham starts to wonder: How can anyone love two such different women? Did he make the right choice? Is there a right choice?
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4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017
First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2017
Copyright © 2017 Katherine Heiny
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Cover images © plainpicture/Rudi Sebastian
Katherine Heiny asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Portions of this work originally appeared, in different form, in the following publications: Chapter one has appeared as “Fluent in Her Language” in the Antioch Review, Winter 2012; chapter two appeared as “The Seamy Side” in the Southern Review, Summer 2013; chapter three appeared as “We’re Here” in the Southern Review, Winter 2013; chapter four appeared as “Lame Duck” in the Gettysburg Review, Summer 2014; chapter five appeared as “Leviathan” in Glimmer Train, Issue 90, Spring / Summer 2014.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008105525
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008105518
Version: 2018-06-27
FOR Ian
Contents
It had begun to seem to Graham, in this, the twelfth year of his second marriage, that he and his wife lived in parallel universes. And worse, it seemed his universe was lonely and arid, and hers was densely populated with armies of friends and acquaintances and other people he did not know.
Here they were grocery shopping in Fairway on a Saturday morning, a normal married thing to do together—although, Graham could not help noticing, they were not doing it together. His wife, Audra, spent almost the whole time talking to people she knew—it was like accompanying a visiting dignitary of some sort, or maybe a presidential hopeful—while he did the normal shopping.
First, in the produce section, they saw some woman with a baby in a stroller and Audra said, “Oh, hi! How are you? Are you going to that thing on Tuesday?” and the woman said, “I don’t know, because there’s that other meeting,” and Audra said, “I thought that got canceled,” and the woman said, “No, it’s still on,” and Audra said, “I wish they wouldn’t double-book this stuff,” and the woman said, “I know,” and Audra said, “Well, if we don’t go, will everyone say bad things about us?” and the woman said, “Probably,” and it wasn’t that Graham wasn’t paying attention, it wasn’t that he missed the specifics—it was that there were no specifics, that was the way they actually talked.
He took his time thumping melons and picking over grapefruit and was actually rewarded for being forced to linger by remembering to buy green grapes, which weren’t on the list.
“Who was that?” he asked when Audra rejoined him.
“Who?” She was peering into the shopping cart.
“That woman you just said hello to.”
“Oh, she has a girl in Matthew’s class,” Audra said, selecting an apple. “And a five-year-old and a toddler and that baby, if you can believe it. But no more, because when the baby was only a week old, she had her husband get a vasectomy. Just made the arrangements and woke him that morning and said, ‘Guess what? You’ve got a doctor’s appointment.’ And he went!”
She took a bite of the apple. Audra was forty-one—a slender woman with a not-quite-perfectly oval face. In fact, Graham sometimes thought, all of Audra was not-quite. Her eyes were not quite brown but had stalled at hazel, her lips were not quite full enough to be lush, her eyebrows were not quite high enough to be called arched, her chin-length hair was not quite auburn, and its messy waves were not quite ringlets. She’d worn her hair this length for as long as Graham had known her. Apparently, if she cut it shorter, it curled up around her face and made her head look overly round, and if she grew it longer, the ends got too heavy and she had to have lots of layers put in. (This was marriage: you started out thinking you’d married the most interesting person in all the world and twelve years later, your head was full of useless hair facts. Of course, there was other stuff in there—some milestones, having a baby, buying a house—but that was basically the essence of it.) Audra was not quite beautiful but her liveliness kept her far away from plain.
