Sometimes, what you really need is a sassy chick lit read.
I certainly did, last week.
Back from a tough trek, feeling tired and in need of both comfort food and comfort reading, I found “The Switch” on my bookshelf.
I’d bought the book at a second hand book shop in Johannesburg, years ago, and there it was, languishing on an inaccessible shelf, just waiting to be read, exactly when my brain was in easy-going, non-taxing mode.
“The Switch” is a fun read, full of Ms Goldsmith’s trademark witty, pithy comments.
The story is about 2 women who switch roles, in order to vie for the attention of the same man. The wife becomes the mistress and vice versa.
Setting aside the fact that you secretly think that there’s no way on God’s green earth that a classy intelligent woman like Sylvie would actually do a switcheroo, just to try and trap her erring husband…as I said, setting that fact aside, the plot makes for an easy, funny read.
Ms Goldsmith has an eye for family dynamics – cue teenage children who don’t even notice that their mother is no longer their mother (and this was in pre-cellphone days, when you feel that our attention span was better. Yikes!)
Sylvie’s mother, Mildred, is a show stopper, fiercely protecting her adult daughter, and generally holding together the whole shambolic plot to make Marla the young mistress into Sylvie the middle-aged wife and therefore her supposed daughter.
Marla is a total flake, hilariously misusing and mispronouncing words and phrases in a manner befitting of George W Bush. (Remember him?)
Enjoyable and strangely engaging, I found my emotions were surprisingly switched around as I read the book.
Published in 1999, the book has aged well over the past 20 years. Just the absence of mobile phones, really, but that’s it.
And now you really want to read this, don’t you?
Here you go.
You know what to do.