You Should Have Known

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Ebook, 2014

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Genres

All Topics

Fiction

General Fiction

Publication

Grand Central Publishing (2014), 449 pages

Description

Fiction. Literature. HTML: Read the "rollickingly good literary thriller" and New York Times bestseller that's the inspiration for the HBO limited series The Undoing, premiering October 25 and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant (Vanity Fair). Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended. Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself..… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member riofriotex

A rather predictable psychological thriller. Grace Reinhart Sachs is a therapist who has just written a book with the same title as this one. Grace's book is about the need for women to pay attention to first impressions when they meet men, subtle signals are there that can predict the outcome of

the relationship. Not surprisingly, Grace did not apply this in her own life.

Since Grace is a therapist, there's a lot of self-analysis of her previous and subsequent actions. Fortunately, this was not as boring as it might have been, or I never would have gotten through this 400+ page book. Since the book was a selection of my local book club, I might not have read it otherwise.

© Amanda Pape - 2016

[This book was borrowed from and returned to my local public library.]

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24 more

LibraryThing member coloradogirl14

Looking back over my reading selections of the last few months, I seem to have a thing for psychological thrillers, especially when the main characters are absolutely loathsome. In this case, we have Grace Sachs, a marriage counselor about to release her first published book, You Should Have Known.

Grace has built her career on helping women recognize the early warning signs of a doomed relationship, with a healthy dose of condescension thrown in. (Why are you so shocked? The signs were there that he was going to cheat on you. You should have known...) In the meantime, she is blissfully married to Jonathan, a hard-working surgeon at a nearby hospital.

From the book blurb and a general knowledge of how psychological thrillers work, we quickly realize that Grace's marriage is NOT as blissful as she believes, and that she's built her life around years worth of lies, deceptions, and ignorance. The fun part of the book is figuring out just how twisted her marriage actually is.

I won't lie. I hated Grace from the first chapter. I hated her smug, patronizing tone with her clients, her obvious self-deception, and her shallow lifestyle. But I couldn't stop reading. In fact, I kept reading with my own sense of smug self-satisfaction, knowing that I wasn't like HER. I would never make the mistakes that SHE'S made. I would never behave like THAT. And I think that's partially why psychological thrillers are so addicting. We can read about other peoples' mistakes and enjoy a detached ego boost in the process. The more things go wrong, the more we can sit back with a smile and enjoy the fact that our lives, at least, haven't turned out THAT poorly.

The other addicting aspect of psychological thrillers are the plot twists, and boy, there are a ton of them in here. But as is the case with all good twists, they arise organically from the plot without feeling like the author just spun a magic "plot twist" wheel to keep the story going.

And for readers who were upset with the lack of redemption and/or closure at the end of Gone Girl, you might enjoy this ending better. Obviously, I won't give away specifics, but let's just say that Grace does not remain unlikeable for the entire story. It takes her awhile to get to that point, but she does get there.

There isn't much to make this book truly stand out from the rest of the new psychological thrillers, but it's still extremely gripping and entertaining. Good option for fans of Gone Girl looking for something new.

Readalikes:

Psychological suspense featuring unlikeable main characters:
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
Dark Places - Gillian Flynn
The Dinner - Herman Koch
The Silent Wife - A.S.A. Harrison

Psychological suspense featuring female protagonists & written by female authors:
Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn
Mother, Mother - Koren Zailckas
The Never List - Koethi Zan

Or, if you're interested in some of the new psychological thrillers being published, try:
The Apple Tree Yard - Louise Doughty
The Innocent Sleep - Karen Perry
Watching You - Michael Robotham

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LibraryThing member Judiex

New York City couples therapist Grace Reinhart Sachs, realized that people may try on twenty pairs of shoes before buying a pair but will marry someone they barely know. All the clues are there but they are ignored. People are seeing the person they want to see, not the person who is actually there

and they either ignore facts or think they can change the person. For example after hearing his story, a woman may think she will be successful because she is better than his previous women friends–she loves him more, she is his intellectual equal.
Grace discusses the role of the therapist. In her case, she helps people try to recognize their current situation, discover what signs they missed, and develop ways to move on. She points out that an vital part of a conversation is behavior and tones of both the speaker and listener. With so much communication today conducted via the internet, those elements are missing.
After looking at the selection of books covering dating and marriage, she did not find any looking at that aspect of dating and selecting a spouse so she wrote one. The book was ready to be released within a few weeks and magazines, newspapers, and talk shows are all lining up to interview her.
On a personal level, her husband of nineteen years, Jonathan, an pediatric oncologist at a highly rated hospital, had been named one of the best doctors in his field. Citing a very disturbing childhood, he has no relationship with his birth family. Their twelve-year-old son, Henry, attended the same exclusive private school that she had attended.
As YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN opens, Grace was attending a committee meeting for a fund raiser for the school. It was very obvious that the other mothers are a group of snobs who look down on everyone who is not of their class. Even Grace doesn’t meet their standards. When the mother of a scholarship student shows up late, the atmosphere gets even more chilly as she partially disrobes to nurse her infant daughter.
A few days later, the day after the successful fundraiser, the mother of one of the students is brutally murdered. Jonathan disappears and suddenly Grace realizes that she actually knows very little about who he really was.
YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN might have been a five-star 250-page novel. It raises interesting points about interpersonal relationships. Unfortunately, it rambles on for almost two hundred more pages. Jean Hanff Korelitz provides too many unnecessary details which distract from the story rather than enrich it. She repeats some descriptions excessively: Jonathan has curly dark hair. One of the police officers has a fat neck. The repair of the tooth that Jonathan had chipped was a slightly different color from the adjacent. After the murder, she wrote about the mothers delivering and picking up their children from school three times, twice noting the responsibility was too important to send a surrogate, usually a nanny, to do so. Once, twice at the most, would have been enough.
In one place she abruptly changes the location. She wrote about how Jonathan was always there for his patients. In one place she pictures him paying a condolence call after the funeral of one of his patients “a square of torn fabric pinned to his coat.” Only the immediate family would wear the torn fabric and he was not a family member.
The second last chapter has some important elements but is essentially a rehash of her life.
Jean Hanff Korelitz is a gifted author who writes for a literate reader. She needs a much better editor.

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LibraryThing member eaklemp

I feel like I have been on a pretty lucky streak lately, having had the pleasure of reading books that were enjoyable and worthy of being passed on. "You Should Have Known" by Jean Hanff Korelitz is no exception. At 438 pages, it isn't exactly a light summer read, but with writing that flows and a

plot that is well-developed, it is a refreshing work of fiction nonetheless.

"You Should Have Known" centers around Grace Sachs, a marriage counselor and therapist living in New York with her husband, pediatric oncologist Jonathan Sachs, and their son Henry. Grace has authored a soon-to-be-published book titled 'You Should Have Known', a self-help of sorts which lambasts women for making terrible choices in companions and spouses when they should have read the tell-tale signs of a doomed relationship from the start. Henry is enrolled at Rearden, a private school catering to the upper-class families of Manhattan, following his mother's footsteps.

Grace's confidence in her expertise on relationships and in her steadfast and loving marriage is shaken and turned upside down when a Rearden student's mother is brutally murdered and Jonathan becomes the primary suspect. In a flurry of humiliation and confusion, the truth about numerous affairs, illegitimate children, and termination of his employment months prior is revealed, leaving Grace devastated and in shock. Everything she thought was true is put to the question. She and Henry quickly depart Manhattan and its inevitable media circus and eventually attempt to start a new life at her lakehouse in Connecticut.

Korelitz is masterful at building suspense. I felt my heart thumping as more and more information was released, felt the frantic helplessness of Grace as she tried desperately to find Jonathan when he disappeared, and gasped when the ropes holding together her life became unraveled string by string. I wanted to reach through the pages and shake her by the shoulders a few times, when 'a-ha moments' would strike me and things fell into place to expose truths before Grace figured them out, or when she purposely and stubbornly fell into denial and refused to see those truths for herself.

The only criticism I have of the book is the romance that Korelitz begins to develop between Grace and her lakehouse neighbor. It starts only a couple months after Grace's world as she knew it came crashing down, and seemed a bit too cavalier and rushed to be believable. A woman who finds out in December that her husband is not only an adulterer but a murderer as well, is not likely to be falling for and kissing another man in late February. I feel as though that part was an attempt by Korelitz to signal that Grace was moving on with her life and would overcome all that had happened, but I believe the book would have been better off without the blooming lovestory at the end.

All in all, this is a solid book. It has a compelling plot and well-developed characters, but is too intense for what I would consider a summer read. Read it when you desire something with more substance, and I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

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LibraryThing member ennie

One recent trend in fiction is the psychological suspense thriller with a twist, and I'm on board (though I can't see what's so great about other trends like dystopian societies, witches or vampires). NetGalley was kind enough to give me this book, and I loved the plot, with its frequent

revelations (didn't see THAT coming). I had to downgrade it to 4 out of 5 stars (which is still good; I'm a tough grader) because the writing was a little windy. It took its sweet time getting to those revelations and let us in too deeply to the heroine's every thought (she is a psychologist, so maybe all that navel-gazing is on purpose). Without spoiling too much, I'll say it's about a psychologist (yeah, we know) who seems to have the perfect life - grew up in wealthy Manhattan, went to Harvard, psychology grad school at Columbia, married to a pediatric oncologist (who everyone is in awe of for doing such meaningful work), has a bustling practice of her own, one precocious tween kid, and lives in the sprawling pre-war apartment she grew up in (mother died, father remarried and moved into the new wife's place, and gave her the old one). There's also an adorable country house in rural CT. At the start of the novel, Grace is being interviewed ahead of her upcoming book release (also titled You Should Have Known), about how women should heed early signs that Mr. Right is not so right - like, he's GAY, silly. Events then occur that make Grace need her own advice.

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LibraryThing member froxgirl

This is the latest and greatest of the domestic thriller genre. Not too twisty, more meditative - the title also could have been "How Wrong Could I Be?". Grace, a therapist with a new book coming out, has her life turned upside down by her husband's perfidy. The premise of her book is that there's

a "tell" for most of us in relationships - a sign that something is wrong or right - and we need to listen to it. Violence and complications ensue. Grace and her son, and the families on both side, react and change. I kept my reading pedal to the metal to finish. A very satisfactory read, if not in the same tranche as Gone Girl or Defending Jacob.

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LibraryThing member Randall.Hansen

While the writing is strong, there is WAY too much of it. Did this book not have an editor to help sharpen the plot and get rid of countless (and some useless) subplots? Korelitz seems to like giving her female lead characters serious personality flaws and/or massive breakdowns -- in which the

characters cease to function normally. Perhaps I should have known -- after reading Admission -- that this book would be more of the same.

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LibraryThing member readersrespite

Secrets. It’s a popular theme in fiction these days. Keeping secrets as well as the havoc and damage secrets can lead to offer an author a multitude of plot avenues to explore. You Should Have Known, the latest novel by veteran author Jean Hanff Korelitz, takes a slightly different tact by

focusing on the victim of family secrets rather that the perpetrator.

Family therapist Grace Sachs has it all: a successful career, a talented son, a husband at the pinnacle of his medical career, and even her first book set for publication entitled You Should Have Known. Interviews, television appearances - it seems everyone is fascinated by Grace’s unique take on marriage counseling. As Grace declares, no one should be surprised when your marriage disintegrates. After all, the signs were all there before you chose to marry. If you chose to ignore them, it was at your own peril. A cheating spouse? A wife with a gambling addiction? An alcoholic, abusive husband? The signs were all there….you should have known.

Grace’s theories, however, soon get put to the test when her own husband’s secrets are publicly - oh how publicly! - revealed, decimating Grace’s marriage, her career, and her public persona. The question quickly becomes: Should Grace have known?

Korelitz walks a fine line throughout the novel with Grace. It is a generally accepted axiom that a protagonist, regardless of faults, should still be sympathetic to the reader. Grace’s hubris makes this a difficult task at times and while Korelitz tries to offset this by elevating her husband’s crimes beyond any and all acceptable lines, she doesn’t always succeed. The narrative is provided by Grace, giving ample opportunity for long introspective monologues throughout the story. Grace’s general refusal to contemplate her own behavior that enabled her husband to commit such an atrocity starts to wear thin after the first 200 pages.

Throughout most of the novel, Grace seems nothing more than a passive, bewildered observer to her own crisis. If the novel took place over the course of a few days this particular trait might be more understandable - ergo, sympathetic - to the reader. Instead, as the weeks and months pass, it verges on the cusp of annoying. Grace simply allows events to happen to her with little reaction aside from perpetually stunned.

Her husband’s crimes - a thread of the story that promises rapt reader attention - become of less and less importance and ultimately find no resolution by the end. This loose end may well have been a deliberate tactic by Korelitz to indicate the relative unimportance his actions - the novel is, after all, about Grace and her self-discovery - but ends up feeling like an untidy detail forgotten in the need to wrap the story up.

For the reader who can overlook this or find some overriding sympathetic qualities in Grace, the story does have many redeeming qualities. Korelitz excels creating the upper-middle-class, New York City environment that encloses Grace and her family. The continual one upmanship that exists amongst New York mothers jockeying for the best private schools, tutors, and exclusive activities for their children is a thought-provoking indictment of societal values. Put another way: Manhattanites take PTA politics to an entirely new level.

Woven in with this is the theme of friendship and the superficiality of many everyday relationships. Grace’s tendency to keep herself at arms-length from those outside her own nuclear family. Ultimately, she suffers from this decision and finds herself with no support system and a son she thinks she is protecting from the real world.

Although the plot of You Should Have Known is compelling enough to keep turning the pages, weak resolutions and questions about Grace’s character linger for me. Whether you experience sympathy or frustration will likely depend on your own judgement of Grace - an irony considering judgment of others is one of Grace’s great flaws.

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LibraryThing member shazjhb

In the beginning of the book I liked none of the characters. The book improved as did the characters, although it was somewhat predictable.

LibraryThing member she_climber

Could have been so much better. As a lover of thrillers and mystery's there just wasn't much suspense and excitement. This is more of an emotional tale, which while still interesting just got a little dry and predictable.

LibraryThing member thewanderingjew

This is not your typical mystery. The reader is pretty much aware of who the murderer is from the get-go. What the reader doesn’t know is why it happened and how the murderer’s obvious emotional illness escaped his wife. Was he a genius or a psychopath? Did she not follow her own advice and

choose him the way she would have chosen a head of lettuce?
What do we know about the characters in this book? Grace Sachs is a therapist who specializes in marriage counseling. Her husband, Jonathan, is a devoted pediatric oncologist. She loves the life they have together and totally believes in the sacrifices his work requires him to make. They live in New York City with their only child, in the same apartment that she grew up in, and their son Henry, who is 12 years old, goes to the same tony private school that she attended as a child. Henry is very well behaved and very likeable; he plays the violin and might be a little bit of a geek. The family lives in its own bubble and is basically self sufficient, needing very little interaction with others; they are isolated from all but some immediate family members. There are secrets lurking here that will explode to the surface as the book reveals their story.
This book seems to be another in that popular genre of today, with characters stereotyped as spoiled rich women with children in an exclusive school. The woman are depicted as shallow and petty, blind to their own foibles, too vain and materialistic, too hedonistic, too quick to criticize and judge others and not themselves. They see themselves and the world through their own rose colored glasses and they are not particularly loyal to anyone. Most of the men are portrayed as governed, not by their brains but rather by their gender and sex.
Grace Sachs has recently written a book, bearing the same name as the title of this book, “You Should Have Known”, which details the reasons married couples should have realized they were making a mistake before taking that fateful step down the aisle. Almost immediately, she writes, one of the spouses reveals to the other exactly who they are and what they will be like, but for some reason, she believes they choose to misremember what happened in their initial meeting. They create a fairytale scene around it, only remembering hints about the problems to come, when a crisis erupts. She believes that women more than men, know when they marry, that the partner they have chosen is wrong for them, but they put on blinders. In her arrogance, has Grace’s own eyesight failed?
Grace is a member of the Fundraising Committee at Henry’s school. At the last meeting, before their major fundraising event takes place, she meets Malaga Alves, a new committee member. Her son, Miguel, attends the school as a scholarship student. In the days to come, Malaga will unexpectedly have a major impact on Grace’s life, turning it completely upside down and forcing her to face very difficult questions she may not be able to answer.
As a couple, seemingly by choice, Grace and Jonathan have few friends. They are preoccupied with their work and raising their son. They live together, but also separately in their own worlds, not interfering with each other’s domain, rarely questioning each other’s activities. When a crisis arises, Grace discovers that she has been irresponsible about the relationships in her own life, failing to see what she would have seen as a therapist dealing with strangers. When it counted most, she was distracted. Now that she was facing her own very traumatic situation, she seemed too weak to deal with it maturely. I found her reactions awkward and difficult to understand. Every time she was faced with a new problem, or with uncomfortable, previously unknown information, she got weak-kneed and threw up! It was not very professional behavior, and I kept thinking, perhaps she needed to hire her own therapist!
Even after her world explodes around her, and she becomes involved in a murder investigation, she doesn’t face things head on, but skirts around the issues, avoiding them. She takes to her bed like an ostrich with her head in the sand, pretending that all will be well. I found her behavior inappropriate and not very credible.
I found the first 100 pages slow to get into, but then the story picked up and held my interest. There are some issues that would lend themselves to group discussions, and for that reason, it is a good read for book clubs. The major hump to get over when reading the book is that a trained therapist never questioned or saw what was happening in front of her eyes for 18 years. She just seemed too naïve, considering her chosen profession, to have constantly made excuses for the odd circumstances of her life, without looking any further than the excuses provided by her husband. Was she really living in such a controlled environment, and was she really in such control of her own emotions that she never questioned any change in her friendships or lifestyles, other than to say, ho hum, oh well? Also, in the end, the author worked out her life a bit too comfortably. It was almost a fairy tale. Long lost relatives appeared and welcomed them into their lives after two decades. She has found a male companion and Henry finds his new school to be utopia for him. Henry is just too perfect, also. He is like the adult in the room, rather than Grace.
I found the conclusion of the book unsatisfying with questions that remained unanswered. Does Henry go on to have a successful life? How does Miguel fare with his father? Does Grace remarry? Is Jonathan caught and convicted? Does Elena ever get to meet Miguel, her half brother? Is the ending even plausible? I think the book could probably have been shorter, but it is a quick read and will hold your interest while on vacation or commuting to work. The book is a suspenseful mystery, but it won’t tax your brain trying to figure it out. The looming question at the end will be, is the plot credible?

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LibraryThing member pgchuis

The story of therapist Grace who has written a book about how people's relationships fail because they choose to overlook character flaws in their partner at the beginning of a relationship and therefore should have known better. Then Grace gradually discovers that her husband has murdered a woman

(Malaga) he has been having an affair with and was sacked from his job months before. Finally she works out that he was a serial philanderer and psychopath and everything he told her about himself was a lie and that he has isolated her from all her friends.

I read this in one sitting more or less and enjoyed the beginning (the committee meeting where Malaga breastfeeds her baby was great) and ending (where Grace meets Jonathan's parents and reunites with Vita etc) very much. The middle dragged a lot and I had a hard time relating to Grace's seeming insistence on keeping her head in the sand. I would have been going through that Blackberry right away. I could have done with a few more examples of Grace revisiting episodes from her marriage and realizing what really went on. She almost seemed to hold that she couldn't have seen it coming sometimes. There was a fair bit of repetition here and long passages of pondering that could have been edited out to keep things moving along. I loved the kicker right at the end that Jonathan wasn't in the Yukon after all.

I do seem to be reading a lot of books lately about how it is impossible to live in New York on the salaries of two professionals. Can this really be true? Grace's viewpoint about relationships made it hard for me to imagine how she could come up with anything helpful to say to her clients. Two months or so after discovering your husband is a murdering psychopath seems to me a bit soon to be embarking on a new relationship, but I daresay Vita will be keeping an eye on that. I liked the way Grace also came to re-evaluate her father and Eva and her father's marriage to her mother. I kept expecting to learn that the reason Jonah's parents' marriage failed and Jonah no longer wanted to be Henry's friend was something to do with Jonathan too.

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LibraryThing member nyiper

Just plain GREAT!!! I have read other books by Korelitz but this one was exceptional from beginning to end! What a story---and I'm so glad I didn't even look at anything on the inside or outside of the book jacket before reading it. Just letting the story unfold was perfect.

LibraryThing member iadam

I received an advance review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Grace, a marriage counselor, seemed to have a wonderful life and everything anyone could ever want, but did she. It took her a long time to come to the realization that her life was seriously broken. Her husband was a

master at manipulating and she never saw any of the warning signs. He was a very charismatic pediatric oncologist who on the outside seemed to be very caring, and kind. He was a charmer and had lied to her from the very beginning about everything and had many secrets. He was a master manipulator who finally manipulated himself into deep ca-ca and could no longer cover up who he really was and what he had done so he just disappeared. He wasn’t about to face the music or admit that he had done anything wrong. He had no feelings and really left Grace and their son holding the bag. She didn’t have a clue. The author does an excellent job of portraying an individual who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience and how they manipulate and relate to others. I give Grace a lot of credit. After a few stumbles she was able to get her act together and go on with her life and care for her son without him. Sometimes it is very difficult to see the warning signs. Wow, this is an excellent book and should be on everyone’s reading list.

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LibraryThing member flourgirl49

Grace, a psychologist, has a husband who turns out to be a psychopath and basically everything about their marriage and him turns out to be a lie. Grace is excellent at dispensing advice to her clients about their failing relationships but doesn't recognize the same qualities in her own marriage

and persists in not understanding or believing all of the horrible things her husband has done for quite some time. I found the book mostly absorbing but probably about 100 pages too long.

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LibraryThing member c.archer

Unlike many other reviewers of this book, I found "You Should Have Known" to be a gripping and addictive story. It engaged me early on with the way the author introduces the characters, and I could feel the suspense slowly building. I happened to like the way that the story builds gradually. I

sensed that each of the seemingly obscure and mundane details at the beginning of the story were leading to something important and that feeling made me want to not put the book down. The author is quite skilled at creating characters that vie for both admiration and disgust from the reader. Some people may be turned off initially by the lifestyle and seemingly petty focus of the striving social ladder climbers of NYC, but it all works into the resulting story and keeps you thinking as you turn the pages. Suspense fans will enjoy this book and recognize the talents of the author to keep building the story without letting the reader down. It is not so much a thriller, but much more a psychological challenge of a read.
I thank the publisher, author, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. I love books that make me think, and "You Should Have Known" delivered masterfully.

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LibraryThing member pdebolt

Grace Sachs has a picture perfect life. She is a respected therapist who has recently written a book advising people to be aware of the signs that indicate a potential spouse may not be suitable. Married to a pediatric oncologist with a 12-year old son in a prestigious Manhattan private school, her

life abruptly crumbles when she is blindsided by a revelation that is staggering in its magnitude. Korelitz slowly unravels the story with a captivating style, which underscores the ironies in Grace's life.

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LibraryThing member elizapoppy

This book is haunting in its revelation about a betrayal in a marriage.

LibraryThing member voracious

Grace is a therapist on the brink of publishing her first book, "You Should Have Known", a self-help book for women seeking to avoid getting into relationships with the wrong men. As a marital therapist of many years, Grace feels she is in a solid position to advise others about this, as most

relationships which end badly could have been predicted by the early warning signs in the relationship. In contrast, Grace and her pediatric oncologist husband, Jonathan, have sustained a happy marriage of 18 years. Subsequently, it comes as quite a shock when the police start asking Grace questions of her husband's whereabouts, after a fellow parent from the private school her son attends is murdered. When Jonathan appears to have gone missing, Grace flees with her 12 year old son, Henry, to their remote summer home, in hopes of evading the paparazzi and accusations suggesting that Grace was somehow involved.

Although somewhat farfetched, I enjoyed this psychological drama, which suggests that one can never fully predict the choices that others will make. I loved the irony regarding Grace's book and how she "should have known" that her husband was not honest with her in their marriage. However, it seemed unlikely that the couple could be married for 18 years and that Grace was described as a particularly insightful therapist, but was unable to catch her husband in any lies in that time. This would make a great book club book since it could lead to good discussions about if bad relationships can be predicted or prevented and the role that denial plays in our close relationships with others.

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LibraryThing member joeydag

Marvelous read. Portrait of a marriage therapist whose marriage of 18 years explodes on the eve of her publishing a relationship advice manual. Very much a book of modern New York City and Jewish milieu. Some ghastly crimes and betrayals are involved as well tragic deaths. To me there were some

rather far-fetched plot issues but I was pleased with the experiences the novel affords. I think I have become a fan of Korelitz.

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LibraryThing member Jodeneg

I enjoyed this book.

LibraryThing member bookwormteri

This book is a very very very slow burn. You never even really meet the husband. He vanishes without the reader getting to know him at all, so when he maybe did something bad, and maybe doesn't work at his job anymore, and maybe had disciplinary hearings that the wife knows nothing about--well, it

isn't a shock. Sure he might be capable of the maybe somethings that he might be being accused of (you aren't even sure until 2/3s of the way through the book that he even is accused of something), because the reader doesn't know him at all. I didn't put it down only because I had invested so much time and the last hundred pages or so are great, but it took WAY too long to get there.

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LibraryThing member nancynova

Grace, a marriage psychologist in NYC has just published a self-help book…and then her own marriage implodes. Her husband is accused of murder and disappears. She retreats to connecticut with their son & slowly the farce that was her marriage emerges. Should she have known?

LibraryThing member bobbieharv

Saw that this book is supposed to be the next "Big Little Lies" on HBO and decided to read it - and then was surprised to learn I'd read an earlier book of hers: Admission. Big surprise - I hated Admission, thought it was very poorly written and didactic; and this book I practically devoured.

Since

it was billed as a psychological thriller, I kept thinking (and hoping) that her husband wouldn't be the villain, and found myself devising ways in which this could happen - up until the jewelry was missing. I think, as some other reviewers have written, that it could have been more suspenseful, but nevertheless as I said I devoured it and thought it was both engrossing and quite well-written.

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LibraryThing member lbswiener

You Should Have Known is a very long book. The characters and storyline are all believable. The book kept its feel from beginning to end. As the title says, you should have known, as the leading character makes her living off of, you should have known, and as the storyline contends, you should have

known; the truth of the matter is, you don't, you can't always know and that is not a bad thing. Because the length of this book is so very long, and storyline so sad and depressing it was awarded four stars in this review.

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