An Unconventional Murderous Love Story

Author Sally Hepworth says this about her 4/4/23 book The Soulmate, “But while The Soulmate started as an exploration of how we might like to murder our husbands, it quickly morphed into something else. An exploration of the bad and good sides of marriage. What we bring to it. What it brings out in us. I like to think of it as a murderous love story. Unconventional, of course, but that’s what I do.”  The story grabs you right from the beginning when a woman plunges to her death from a high seaside bluff favored by suicides. The story is told from the point of view of two of the main characters, the wives of two couples, Pippa and Amanda, one dead and one alive. 

Through the alternating narratives of the women we learn about their relationships with their husbands, what brought them to the dramatic and tragic scene on the bluff, how their lives intertwined, the complications of their relationships, and the challenge to understanding what is real as Amanda describes, “It’s as if, while living your life, you view the world through a straw. You see only the tiniest sliver, all of it from your own perspective. Other people have their motives, their backstories, their feelings, but you don’t know that unless they share them with you, and even then there’s every chance they’re lying or prevaricating. What strikes me most now is the audacity of people, walking around with such certainty while armed with only the scantest information. I’m ashamed to say I was one of those people.”

Pippa recounts her mother’s words about her own marriage as a cautionary tale, “Your father was the love of my life. There will never be anyone else for me.’ How exquisitely, stupidly tragic. That was when I decided I’d never marry my soulmate. From what I could see, marrying your soulmate was reckless. A commitment like marriage was best treated like a contract, with a list of terms and conditions, and the potential to extricate yourself if the terms were breached. If I left love out of it, I would never end up the way my mother had, I reasoned. Unfortunately, as so many of us do, I turned into my mother.”  

If motivations and actions of men and women are based on “the scantest information,” they can still produce the most dire consequences. Themes in the book involve marriage, family relationships, motherhood, postpartum depression, bipolar and ADHD conditions, victims and survivors of suicide, the costs, challenges, and benefits of building a highly successful company, and finding balance between career, children, spouse, and community. All these issues are spun in a way that most of the story has readers on the edge of their seats navigating its twists and turns, where turning the page sometimes feels like opening a door in a haunted house, wondering what lurks on the other side, which is the thrill of reading such a book.

This is the third Sally Hepworth book I’ve read this year, all have been highly suspenseful and entertaining, and none of them have been disappointing. The biggest disappointment will be when I’ve run out of her books to read and have to wait, impatiently, until the next one’s published.