Nipples Were The Hottest Fashion Accessory At Paris Couture Week

“The problem with being a wife is being a wife,” writes Carmela Ciuraru in Lives of the Wives, her recent book about five literary marriages. The role has historically been unglamorous, she continues, requiring women to play the part of “chattel, cook, housekeeper, and nursemaid,” while enduring the type of struggles you’d expect when partnering with an egomaniac who happens to be a talented artist.

Marriage is on the decline in the United States — research shows that a quarter of millennials have never been married — but books about wives remain so common that they have become a bookstore cliche. Their covers often show faceless women, headless women, women from behind. “Who is she?” they seem to want you to ask, maybe while mentally grafting your own head onto the pictures. What can we make of this genre that positions women at the center while also stressing their domestic subservience to men? What is the point of these books, and why do we keep making it?