Have you checked your family bank account lately? What about your relationship account? These are two questions that the Mama Lit July Book Club read, Mrs. Perfect, poses to the reader through the horrible twist of fate facing its lead character. The follow up to author Jane Porter’s novel Odd Mom Out, Mrs. Perfect follows the life of that novel’s nemesis, Taylor Young: the Super Mom of all Stay-at-Home Moms in a posh Seattle suburb.
We begin by examining Taylor Young’s life, focusing on the external aspects that glimmer like a glossy magazine cover: her days are spent chairing a multi-million dollar benefit auction for her daughter’s school, sipping gin & tonics with friends poolside at their elite country club, wearing expensive designer outfits, living in a lakeside mansion she helped custom design, driving a Lexus SUV. The conversations among Taylor and her girlfriends are plastic, the expectations to live life more extravagantly than others high. But we all know that behind the rich lifestyle lurks actual human beings, and this is where Porter takes the reader deeper, to a place where we can all relate, as moms, as wives, as women.
Taylor Young’s life basically gets hit by a Mack truck carrying surprises about her marriage, her family finances, and brings up thought-to-be buried past relationships (her mother) and brings forth unexpected new relationships (nemesis Marta Zinsser). While some of the scenarios play a little OC-style-dramatic for my taste, the heart of the novel is solid and its message clear: as individuals, we are all much more valuable than what others may perceive our worth to be.
Original theme? Perhaps not, but Porter with her ever present mirror pointed at today’s modern woman thankfully doesn’t leave us there. She takes us beyond the usual “money can’t buy happiness” message and through Taylor Young’s mistakes, family secrets, and her eventual journey to strength and rediscovery, Porter reminds the reader why and how money can’t buy happiness, and also how it is never too late for women to reclaim their own power, their own identities, and in doing so, thus strengthening the family unit as a whole. In today’s uncertain economy, I found this messaging to be extremely timely: Taylor Young may be your next door neighbor, your best friend, your mother, or yourself.
Porter always does a fabulous job of creating characters with flaws that most women can relate to, and strengths that most women aim to achieve. In Odd Mom Out, I completely related with Marta Zinsser’s fierce independent streak and her disdain for stereotypes. In Mrs. Perfect, I found myself relating to Taylor Young’s moments of questioning: what am I doing? Who have I — who have we, as husband and wife — become? Where are we going, and what do we want our children to take away from these life lessons? Porter more than any other female author I have encountered paints such an accurate portrait of today’s modern mother, with such aching love for her kids and such conflict within herself. More than the typical mommy wars books, Porter manages to rise above the stay-at-home versus working mom drama and brings the reader to a higher plateau of questioning, one on which we are all mothers trying to do the best for our families, merely asking ourselves — not society — how we best want to live our own lives. I can’t help but read her novels and end with an “I am woman! Hear me roar!” feeling — in a good way, of course.
Mrs. Perfect is about remembering to nurture the independent, intelligent, highly capable woman inside all of us mothers. It’s a reminder that we are in our relationships together, not separately, and that our relationships with our spouses and partners need tending to as much as our relationships with our children and our friends. Mrs. Perfect is the perfect summer read to remind us all that we are truly capable of moving mountains, determining destinies and changing lives– especially our own.











