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You Should Have Known: Now on HBO as the Limited Series The Undoing Paperback – September 30, 2014

by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Author)
Editors' pick Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
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Read the "rollickingly good literary thriller" and New York Times bestseller that's the inspiration for the most talked about TV series of 2020, HBO's The Undoing starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant (Vanity Fair).
 
Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended.

Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.
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Previous page
  1. Print length
    454 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Grand Central Publishing
  4. Publication date
    September 30, 2014
  5. Dimensions
    5.25 x 1.25 x 8 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1455599514
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1455599516
  8. See all details
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Popular Highlights in this book
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  1. And it’s that impulse to negate our own impressions that is so astonishingly powerful.
    Highlighted by 689 Kindle readers
  2. “The difficulty is when people count on that ‘you just know,’ and they dismiss people they don’t respond to right away. I actually think there are lots of good matches for each person, and they cross our paths all the time, but we’re so wedded to the idea of love at first sight that we can miss the really great people who don’t come with a thunderbolt attached.”
    Highlighted by 336 Kindle readers
  3. “Human transformation is possible. It requires immense courage and selflessness, but it does happen. It’s just that we spend so much effort on that slim possibility of correction and none at all on the side of prevention. That’s a serious disconnect, don’t you think?”
    Highlighted by 216 Kindle readers
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ms. Korelitz's book is smart and devious - enough so to bring to mind another work of trickery, one that has "Gone" in its title and does not feature Scarlett O'Hara."―The New York Times

"Tempt the gods with smug self-righteousness and they will deliver a windfall of tragedy, as witness in Jean Hanff Korelitz's rollickingly good literary thriller...Korelitz writes intimately and engagingly about a social strata few are privy to, but the ugliness is very familiar."―Vanity Fair

"This consuming, expertly plotted thriller moves along at a slow burn, building up to shocking revelations about Grace's past and ending with a satisfying twist on her former relationship mantra; 'doubt can be a gift.'"―People

"Korelitz does not disappoint as she chronicles the emotional unraveling of her heroine in this gripping saga...A cut above your average who-is-this-stranger-in-my-marriage-bed novel, "You Should Have Known'' transforms itself at certain moments from a highly effective thriller into a nuanced novel of family, heritage, identity, and nurture."―The Boston Globe

"The thriller we're obsessed with."―Entertainment Weekly

"This excellent literary mystery [unfolds] with authentic detail in a rarified contemporary Manhattan. . . intriguing and beautiful."―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An unputdownably deft vivisection of Manhattan's upper social strata."―Vogue.com

About the Author

Jean Hanff Korelitz was born and raised in New York and graduated from Dartmouth College and Clare College, Cambridge. She is the author of one book of poems, The Properties of Breath, and three previous novels, A Jury of Her Peers, The Sabbathday River, The Devil and Webster, and The White Rose, as well as a novel for children, Interference Powder. She has also published essays in the anthologies Modern Love and Because I Said So, and in the magazines Vogue, Real Simple, More, Newsweek, Organic Style, Travel and Leisure (Family), and others. She lives in Princeton, NJ with her husband (Irish poet Paul Muldoon, poetry editor at the New Yorker and Princeton poetry professor) and two children.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Grand Central Publishing; First Edition (September 30, 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 454 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1455599514
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1455599516
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1.25 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:

About the author

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Jean Hanff Korelitz

Jean Hanff Korelitz

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Jean Hanff Korelitz is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels THE PLOT (The 2021 Tonight Show Summer Reads pick), YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN (adapted for HBO as "The Undoing" by David E. Kelley, and starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant and Donald Sutherland), ADMISSION (adapted as the 2013 film starring Tina Fey), THE DEVIL AND WEBSTER, THE WHITE ROSE, THE SABBATHDAY RIVER and A JURY OF HER PEERS. A new novel, THE LATECOMER, will be published on May 31st, 2022. Her company BOOKTHEWRITER hosts "Pop-Up Book Groups" in person in NYC and online, where small groups of readers can discuss new books with their authors. www.bookthewriter.com

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
8,613 global ratings
Superficial to the point of absurdity!
1 Star
Superficial to the point of absurdity!
Terrible book. A complete waste of time. Simplistic to the point of absurdity. It actually made me mad that I wasted my time reading it. Its about a therapist that is in what she believes, a happy marriage for 18 years, only to find out that the man she is married to is not at all what she thought he was and that the marriage had serious issues. I don’t want to give the plot away too much, although I would not recommend reading the book at all. I kept reading as I thought that she would have some deep insight as to how one can so mislead one self, or how someone who is suppose to be perceptive and smart about emotions and relations (the heroine is after all a therapist) could lie to oneself so much, yet nothing. At the end of the book all the pieces are carefully brought to closure, and within a few months, she moves on, starts a new practice, and begins a new relations with the perfect man, resolves long st ding issues. With her father, and her childseems totally undammaged by it all. I have suffered more as a result of a petty family argument and for longer than a few months than this “therapist” who has lived a lie for 18 years, build her practice around a complete misunderstanding of humans, and severed all friendships. Give me a break. Save yourself time, and throw this book in the garbage.
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Top reviews from the United States

JD
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow! What a great book
Reviewed in the United States on March 26, 2024
Verified Purchase
At first I thought this was just going to be another book about the hyper-competitive Manhattan elites and the women with their claws out. However it turned into something much more interesting. I also liked that it was a more lengthy and fleshed out story than many of the books that come out today that don’t even hit 300 pages. I enjoy a book with a strong, character-driven story.
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The Attentive Reader
4.0 out of 5 stars Reader: Don't Give Up!
Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2014
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Page one: Grace Reinhart Sachs is in her office being interviewed and photographed for Vogue, one of many events preceding the publication of her book "You Should Have Known: Why Women Fail to Hear What the Men in Their Lives Are Telling Them." Grace is a therapist whose practice focuses on unraveling relationships. For weeks she has been surrounded by all the pros that populate the bandwagon of a major book launch, and assured her book will “snag the Zeitgeist.” She goes to a meeting in an Upper East Side apartment straight out of Architectural Digest, joining a group of expensively-tended women to finalize the details of a fundraising gala for the private school their children attend. Next, she picks up her young son for his violin lesson with an instructor who takes only the most promising students. They head home to get dinner going. Both hope Jonathan Sachs M.D., father and husband, can break free of his lucrative practice in pediatric oncology to join them.

Let’s just say any problems these people have are going to fall into the category of First World Problems. Actually – and definitely worse – they’re going to have Upper East Side Problems.

Korelitz has a gift for dialogue, so it was disappointing that the first third of the book was largely narrative. But I plugged along, and finally realized the author’s intention. Grace is surrounded by people in her professional, personal, and social lives, but she lives a largely solitary and disengaged life. In the early chapters, Korelitz buries Grace in the text, endlessly describing Grace’s thoughts and daily life. I was a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of words on the pages. These early chapters are a lesson in rebellion against the “Don’t Tell Us; Show Us” lesson every writing teacher preaches. It’s a bold stylistic choice, and it pays off. Grace is never off the page; other characters enter and exit only to engage with her in brief conversation. The narrative simultaneously distances us from Grace and mirrors her, as it becomes clear that Grace is equally distanced from her story and herself. She has the right house, clothes, husband, and son. She says almost all the right words to her patients. But her life is a sham, an empty shell. It is not clear if she does not realize this, or if she chooses not to acknowledge it. And it is that ambiguity which makes the story most compelling. Who amongst us is consistently clear about ourselves and our intentions?

If you stick with it for 75 pages (and I skimmed a bit), you are rewarded with a tense and riveting plot and a cast of well-drawn characters. Grace finds her voice at a point when her world and almost everything she thought counted is upended. The dialogue becomes the novel’s driving force and we experience Grace in the “Show Us” mode that makes for a satisfying novel. She regains her balance when she escapes Manhattan for Upstate New York, where she and Jonathan have a summer house on a lake. (Well, of course they do.)

Korelitz has written a serious and literate novel about marriage and self-knowledge, and managed to pepper it with great houses, good looking neighbors, excellent food descriptions, and a winning rescue dog. I liked it a lot!
11 people found this helpful
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DebO
3.0 out of 5 stars Be Prepared to Dislike the Main Character
Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2016
Verified Purchase
This book has a lot going for it, although I agree with others that the first section is much more interesting than the last two. There is some great stuff in the last two sections, but it could have been dealt with more quickly.

But be prepared to read a book that has a very unsympathetic main character. I think the character has to be unsympathetic at the beginning to make the point that Korelitz is making, but Grace is so unsympathetic that it's very difficult to not believe that she deserves what she gets. She is blind to her husband and herself although she writes a book warning others not to be, which is the point. But she's so cold, arrogant, condescending, and self-congratulatory that it's difficult to care as her life falls apart. In fact, you're almost glad to see it happen.

However, the author handles the mystery and suspense very well, which keeps you reading if you can set aside hating Grace. The character does change and mellow to some degree. But there is no way this woman should be licensed to practice therapy with her cold attitude, and certainly she has no expertise on which to base a book on marriage. I can't help but wonder how many lives she screwed up as a therapist, how many marriages she could have helped and didn't because of her attitude. Of course, she's fiction, and those people don't exist. But if they did . . .

What Grace does to her patients is as bad or worse than what her husband does to his patients' families except for that last, fatal case. It takes a lot of empathy and true caring to be a good health-care provider, and she is capable of neither. She does, unfortunately, represent what happens all too often in this country these days. Doctors go into medicine for the money. They spend as little time with patients as possible because the money is in quantity, not quality. Those of us who are old enough to remember when doctors even made house calls find dealing with these young snots very difficult, and know we are not getting quality care. That just makes Grace even more unsympathetic and difficult to like.

But the book is really quite good if you can deal with a main character who isn't likable. The mystery is fascinating, and it's fun to see all the pieces fall into place and all the questions answered, just as it is in any mystery. It's a good, fun read, but it's not a book that calls for multiple readings, as really good books are. Grace is simply not likable enough. In fact, other than the poor kid who is a little TOO perfect to be believable, the only characters it's possible to warm up to are the minor characters of Grace's former friend, a woman named Sylvia, and Grace's father, and they occupy very little of the book.
6 people found this helpful
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PR
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb literature
Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2021
Verified Purchase
I was very curious about this book after all the publicity it received due to the HBO series, (which I have not yet seen) and especially after reading the best and the worst reviews on Amazon. I decided to buy it after checking the Look Inside excerpt, which I found very captivating. The writing is superb, the literary quality is unquestionable and the development of the main character is perfect. You become her, you feel what she feels and you evaluate others using her standards. The empathy is all there. I haven't read a book with over 400 pages in just a few days in a very long time but this one captured my attention throughout. It fully deserves 5 stars.
5 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Anita Flegg
5.0 out of 5 stars Loved this book - full of honest emotion
Reviewed in Canada on April 22, 2021
Verified Purchase
I picked up the book because the TV series looked interesting, but I haven't seen the dramatization.
I enjoyed reading about Grace's journey through the unravelling of her perfect marriage and life. I found her roller-coaster of emotions believable - the descriptions remind me of times when my world view was turned upside down, and I had to start over from the bottom, rebuilding my understanding of how things worked.
A lot of the reviewers seemed to think she deserved -- in some way -- what happened to her, while I found that I felt a lot of compassion for her.
Everyone around her, including her son, had seen signs that things weren't exactly as they seemed, but in each case it was understandable that they hadn't mentioned it, especially since her husband had slowly and carefully separated her from her friendships -- so carefully that Grace didn't even realize it until she no longer had anyone to turn to. The reader sees all, so it's easy to blame her for blindness, but when you are committed to a person, it's easy to ignore what seem like small, or easily explained, problems.
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Kermit80
4.0 out of 5 stars Introspettivo
Reviewed in Italy on November 9, 2022
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L'ho comprato dopo avere sentito parlare della serie TV, ma prima di averla vista. Mi è piaciuto tanto, anche se è molto diverso da quanto mi aspettassi: pensavo fosse un thriller, quando in realtà è più un romanzo introspettivo/psicologico; a volte un po' prolisso (soprattutto nella parte iniziale), ma sempre piacevole.
Senza spolilerare nulla... è molto diverso dalla serie televisiva!
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Tathiana Carvalho
5.0 out of 5 stars muito bom
Reviewed in Brazil on December 9, 2020
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a estoria do livro é diferente da serie em alguns aspectos.
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JC
5.0 out of 5 stars Renaissance
Reviewed in France on September 12, 2021
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Thérapiste promise à un bel avenir avec la parution de son premier livre, l’héroïne, Grâce, va peut-être se trouver involontairement confrontée aux problèmes et aux crises qui assaillent ses patients.
Une histoire parfaitement maîtrisée et un véritable suspens.
Personnage attachant, livre passionnant.
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David Whybra
5.0 out of 5 stars Mixed reader reaction
Reviewed in Germany on February 24, 2021
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The insights into the psyche are interesting, especially as the novel seems to be all about a collective New York psyche slowly driving everyone in the city mad. Apparently, the only cure lies in moving out, about an hour's drive away. A long exposition makes life hard for the reader, but it's worth it, as we are then caught on the wrong foot by the developments of the plot - surprising and enlightening. The dénouement is followed by a 'long' rundown and retiming of life in non-big-city upstate New York. But why should I feel relief when finally putting the novel down?
Were the gymnastics of the psyche too much of a good thing?
One person found this helpful
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