The Silent Wife

The Silent Wife belongs to the genre of psychological thrillers aimed at a female audience. These thrillers often take place in a domestic setting and examine intimate personal relationships that have gone awry. The domestic thriller plays into the tension between appearances and reality, with abuse, addiction, and infidelity often hidden behind a carefully-maintained façade of a happy family. Like Jodi, the women at the center of these stories find themselves both victimized by and responsible for the construction and maintenance of the façade.

Many successful novels of this genre have been adapted to popular film and television projects—for example, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, and Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies. One common element that may appeal to women readers is the way books in this genre work to develop fully-realized characters. Gone Girl and The Silent Wife, for example, both alternate between each spouse’s point of view in different chapters. Many novels in this genre also provide an in-depth exploration of the woman’s sense of identity and place in the world, featuring intimate marital, sexual, and parental dynamics that reveal the pressures placed on upper-middle class women.