Wrecked

In her controversial first novel, Wetlands, which The New York Times called “a cri de coeur against the oppression of a waxed, shaved, douched and otherwise sanitized women’s world,” Roche wrote about sex and the female body in an unprecedentedly frank way. Roche’s second novel, Wrecked, is just as raw and powerful as her debut but is a more mature work that deals with sex, death, fidelity and the question of what is expected from a 21st-century wife and mother.

It’s easier to give a blow job than to make coffee. That’s what Elizabeth Kiehl, mother of seven-year-old Liza, thinks to herself after a particularly lengthy and inventive bout of sex with her husband Georg—recounted in detail over the book’s first sixteen pages. Elizabeth makes great efforts to pleasure her husband in the bedroom and is also an extremely thoughtful and caring mother to her daughter. But her perfect mother and wife act hides a painful past and a tragic rift in her psyche. As a result, Elizabeth’s relationship with Georg is rather unusual: most husbands and wives wouldn’t watch porn together or go off on joint trips to a local brothel for threesomes with prostitutes while their daughter is at school. But is their relationship unhealthy or just a very modern marriage?