The Mad Wife by Meagan Church

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The details…

  • Title: The Mad Wife
  • Author: Meagan Church
  • Publisher: Sourcebooks
  • ISBN-13: 9781464236747
  • Publication date: September 30, 2025
  • Available formats: ebook, paperback, hard cover, audiobook
  • Print length: 352 pages
  • File size: ‎5.9 MB
  • Audiobook: narrated by Susan Bennett, 8 hours and 58 minutes
  • Genre: historical women’s fiction
  • Themes: family, marriage, motherhood, friendships, neighbors, mental health, children, loss, grief, domestic life, suburban life, 1950’s, postpartum depression, anxiety, gaslighting, pregnancy

The blurb from the publisher…

From bestselling author Meagan Church comes a haunting exploration of identity, motherhood, and the suffocating grip of societal expectations that will leave you questioning the lives we build—and the lies we live. 

They called it hysteria. She called it survival.

Lulu Mayfield has spent the last five years molding herself into the perfect 1950s housewife. Despite the tragic memories that haunt her and the weight of exhausting expectations, she keeps her husband happy, her household running, and her gelatin salads the talk of the neighborhood. But after she gives birth to her second child, Lulu’s carefully crafted life begins to unravel.

When a new neighbor, Bitsy, moves in, Lulu suspects that something darker lurks behind the woman’s constant smile. As her fixation on Bitsy deepens, Lulu is drawn into a web of unsettling truths that threaten to expose the cracks in her own life. The more she uncovers about Bitsy, the more she questions everything she thought she knew—and soon, others begin questioning her sanity. But is Lulu truly losing her mind? Or is she on the verge of discovering a reality too terrifying to accept?

In the vein of The Bell Jar and The Hours, The Mad Wife weaves domestic drama with psychological suspense, so poignant and immersive, you won’t want to stop listening.

My thoughts…

In The Mad Wife, Meagan Church shines a light on the familiar image of the 1950s housewife, exposing unsettling truths about domestic life. At first glance, Lulu Mayfield’s world is idyllic. She lives in a modern home, has a devoted husband, and makes gelatin salads that are the envy of the neighbors. But from the very beginning, there’s a sense that something isn’t right. A heaviness surrounds Lulu, a deep, lingering unease. Her ordered life conceals something corrosive. The glossed-over cracks in her carefully maintained world on Twychkenham Court are about to split wide open, spilling unbearable heartbreak onto the street for all to see.

At its start, readers are drawn into the familiar rhythms of suburban domesticity: neighborhood gossip, playdates, cocktail parties, housework, and the quiet tyranny of keeping up appearances. Church’s historical precision anchors the narrative, while her attention to décor, food, and etiquette creates a reality that exposes something much darker—tension and anxiety. These two things provide the storytelling with texture and subtext. There is the world as Lulu experiences it, and the world as it truly is. By the time the story pivots toward psychological suspense, the twists feel earned rather than engineered. The emotional truths unfold the way they often do—painfully and all at once—making the novel’s latter half both breathtaking and inevitable.

Though set more than seventy years ago, The Mad Wife speaks powerfully to the present. Lulu’s struggles echo what so many women still experience today. Her fear of being dismissed or medicated into silence mirrors contemporary battles with medical gaslighting and the pressure to appear “fine.” When Lulu tries to advocate for herself, she reveals clarity, not madness. Through Church’s patient storytelling, she reminds readers that the structures that once confined women haven’t vanished; they’re still hiding in plain sight, growing subtler and more insidious.

This story isn’t merely about falling apart, though. Through a precise, deliberate narrative, Church shows how the world around a woman can breed mental collapse. Pressure and silence can twist a person until they barely recognize themselves. Her unflinching yet compassionate narrative allows readers to see how expectation can erode identity and worth. Lulu’s unraveling makes clear how the pressure to be agreeable, to be pretty, to be grateful can bend a person until the bending feels like breaking. Her breakdown isn’t a mystery; it’s an honest look at how conformity and imposed silence strip a woman of her agency. In the end, Lulu isn’t someone to be pitied; she’s someone who deserves to be understood.

What truly sets this novel apart is its tenderness. Church never turns Lulu’s suffering into spectacle; she gives it space to breathe. The story is rendered with honesty, dignity, and compassion. Lulu’s postpartum depression, her misdiagnosis, her exhaustion, and her gaslighting feel like realities whispered into a room where no one bothers to listen. Yet, readers don’t observe Lulu from afar; they inhabit her disorientation, her frustration, and her slow, painful recognition that what’s breaking her may not be madness at all, but the world around her.

Final thoughts…

At its core, The Mad Wife is an intimate story about motherhood, identity, and the strength it takes to question the roles we’re handed. Church captures the ache of being needed by everyone yet understood by no one. Though set in the past, the novel feels startlingly relevant. She doesn’t merely resurrect the ghosts of the 1950s; she shows that they never truly left, where they still whisper through every impossible standard we continue to chase.

Strengths…

  • Poignant
  • Powerfully told
  • Compelling characters
  • Memorable
  • Well-scripted 
  • Emotionally gripping

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A bit about the author…

Meagan Church is the New York Timesand USA Today bestselling author of The Mad Wife, The Girls We Sent Away, and The Last Carolina Girl. She writes emotionally-charged, thought-provoking, empathy-inducing stories that explore the complexity of human nature. Her historical fiction chronicles the plight and fight of unheard voices of the past. Meagan holds a B.A. in English from Indiana University and is an adjunct for Drexel University’s MFA in creative writing program. A Midwesterner by birth, she now lives in North Carolina with her high school sweetheart, three children, and a plethora of pets.

To learn more about Meagan Church, visit her website.

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