No More Perfect Marriages: Experience the Freedom of Being Real Together

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Oh, the emotions this book made me feel! I laughed, I cried, I wanted to hug it and I wanted to fling it across the room. Hoover certainly knows how to elicit feeling from her readers. It's because her characters are so real, raw and flawed. The characters and the situations they face resonate deeply with you. There's always been a difference between crying over a book and a book making me cry. And this one really toed the line. But isn't that a sign of a good artist? I've always found crying to be a release of feelings I didn't need to hold onto anymore, and I got a whole lot of feelings out with this read. I think Quinn and Graham reminded me of my parents, in the way they acted around each other, and I needed to get pent up feelings about that out. This book had potential but from the way the whole story was structured to the ungodly amount of tragedy heaped on the heroine, CoHo made it really hard for me to care for the characters and the story.

I remember after we had calmed down, looking at Amanda (who was still crying) and just laughing. After a second, she started laughing too because we simply couldn’t help it! The whole thing was just too silly! She on the other hand is distant to him. Uses him and his body for one and one purpose alone. Gets upset when he calls her out on this. She basically plays corpse when he is trying to make love to her, essentially making the poor man feel like he’s r*ping his wife instead of having the consensual and sensual love making he is used to. I easily and effortlessly fell in love with Quinn. Everything she was going through, and the way that CoHo wrote about it, felt like such an accurate depiction of depression. I felt for her constantly and my heart is still filled with so much empathy for this fictional character. I’m going to go crawl into my bed and spend approximately 2 years sobbing over this book and the pain it brought upon me.

Quinn is characterized as this kind-hearted and caring woman. But she isn’t. Her behaviour is selfish and uncaring. I get that she is hurt/grieving because she can’t have children, but she is basing her entire self-worth (and at one point EVERY person’s entire self-worth) on having children. She is constantly going on about how she and her body are broken and how she is failing her responsibilities to Graham by not being able to give him children – which he has never said. Quite the contrary. He TRIES to make it clear to her MULTIPLE TIMES that he is with her because he loves HER and while he may want to have children, he’s ultimately okay with not having them, because he is with her because of HER and NOT because of her ability to give him a child. What’s the secret to such a perfect marriage?” The old man leaned forward and looked at me very seriously. “Our marriage hasn’t been perfect. No marriage is perfect. There were times when she gave up on us. There were even more times when I gave up on us. The secret to our longevity is that we never gave up at the same time.” Quinn and Graham are two married couple whose marriage is on the brink of collapse. There were many things that contributed to this collapse, which readers will slowly learn through the course of the book. However, the main contributor to their marriage’s demise was Quinn’s infertility. It’s really the main thing that drives the plot and the conflict. And if this trope is not your thing, I would suggest to skip this one because it’s this book’s main theme.

I’ve also found that every book has many little imperfections. The Old Bard of Avon included in this, but it’s about how all those tiny little imperfections (this metaphor is becoming very rhythmic with this book’s title) wrap up to make it perfect. That’s that last star - in a world where nothing can be perfect, that last star is handed to how beautiful an author can execute it's imperfections.

Reviews

The worst thing we could do right now is show emotion, Quinn. Don’t get angry. Don’t cry.” – Graham Which brings me to my last point. Other readers have said this was an emotional book and I can see that but this felt very manipulative, calculated maximum tear jerk. But one thing I realized about myself as a reader is that the more an author makes the heroine suffer by letting her go through tragedy after tragedy, after the fewer the tears i shed. Sometimes, I think I appreciate Colleen Hoover when she marries the romance genre with sensitive and usually, skirted upon topics within literature. This very rarely is approached in today's writer society and so, it's colossal in it's results. There was a plot twist, if you want to call it that, just introduced to make things more tragic – unnecessarily so. Was there an actual need to have her have a miscarriage? And loose her uterus in the process? Also, you want me to believe this woman, OBSESSED with getting pregnant and being TERRIFIED of getting her period every month, wouldn’t notice that she didn’t have it for three months? Sure.

And the juxtaposition of seeing Quinn and Graham when they meet in the most fated meeting of all time, to their marriage completely falling apart because they both feel so much guilt, makes for a reading experience I don’t even have words for. Side note: CoHo writes the best first chapters in existence. Every one is a mini masterpiece that completely draws the reader in and enthralls and captures them, and All Your Perfects was no exception. Another thing that didn’t work for me were the secondary characters. Quinn’s mother was also a piece of work and wasn’t a very developed character. She’s just there to be terrible and make Quinn feel bad. And now that I think about it, this book didn’t have a lot of characters. We get to briefly meet Quinn’s sister and her husband, Quinn and Graham’s exes, and Graham’s sister, but they’re not very well-developed characters either. They’re there to prop up (Quinn’s sister) or tear down (Quinn’s mother) the two main protagonists. I didn’t really like Graham either. He is, in my opinion, one of Hoover’s weakest heroes. And I don’t know if it’s because we didn’t get his POV or whatever but he was just boring. The whole cheating thing—yes, it was cheating and there was really no justification for it—made me dislike him even more. I’m not even going to touch on his asinine reason for doing so but yeah, I wasn’t a fan of Graham at all. Not even his letters could make me like him. It was truly so hard to get past chapter 22. But this is such a reality for so many women that I felt as though I needed to see how this continued. How anyone continues after the hardest day of their life. How anyone can even manage it. I'm still crying. I finished this book at 4:06 in the morning and I'm still sitting here re-reading some of the paragraphs and sobbing to myself. I don't think I have ever not regretted reading a book like this one. (Sorry for the double negative, it's one of those days, bear with me)

Discussions

SPOILERS AHEAD - from this book and other Colleen Hoover’s books because I can’t stand her writing and if you love her books DON’T read my review because we’re not going to see eye to eye and I’m okay with that! All Your Perfects is about a troubled marriage, the impact of infertility, and acceptance of what one cannot control.

I’m going to put the trigger and content warnings below this paragraph! But if you want to go into this book completely blind, like many of Colleen Hoover’s readers do, please do not read my review. Plus, honestly? If you don’t have any triggers, it probably is best to go into this book blind. I won’t post any spoilers about the events of this book, but the rest of my review will talk about what this book is centered around. Annnnnddddd that’s all I’m going to say plot wise, no spoilers. As per usual with a Coho book I think it’s best to go in blind (like I did) and see what unfolds. I do think this subject matter will be VERY difficult for some readers. But I think Hoover handled it all brilliantly. This is not a bash on anyone that disliked this book because of this, nor does this in any way make your opinion inconsistent. We all feel differently when we read, and that's one of the most beautiful things about reading. It should come as no surprise that as I went through the process of writing “Rules of Engagement”, we would find ourselves once again disagreeing on a number of issues. There were days when I felt like a complete hypocrite. “How can I release a book instructing couples on how to fight fair when we can’t do it ourselves?” I would ask. Several times, I questioned my own qualifications in writing it.Nothing she said or did made me feel like this is a relationship where both parties are, or were, equally emotionally involved. There were times where I would say that she definitely only used him for one thing and one thing only: a necessary ingredient for making a child. Honestly, why do I bother with the human life?? I might as well become a part of the floor so Colleen Hoover has an ACTUAL reason to step on me. Like YouTube has so many tutorial videos on so many things. Maybe someone out there felt nice enough to upload a tutorial video on, “How to become a part of the Floor?”