How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📗

I’ve also realized that love comes in spurts. A little, then a lot. It’s not a permanent wave of happiness. Permanent waves only happen to hair – and even then you have to get them redone every six months. Love is an hors d’oeuvre, a caviar-encrusted canapé, not a staple diet. I need the meat and potatoes of family, kids, new tiles for the kitchen, whining about income tax, the stodgy, day-to-day fare of domestic life. They’re the emotional carbohydrates which I crave . . . with, just, the occasional fabulously, fattening sticky pud.

Hannah and Jazz are bantering in the background. I’d like to join in, but how can I stay friends with a murderess? Well, not that Jazz actually murdered Studz. Sure, she’d loaded the gun. But it was fate which had pulled the trigger . . . Maybe one day, I’ll bring it up in therapy . . . Yeah, right.

And so we sail into the sunrise, buoyed up by this friendly fug of banter and bonhomie, sputtering and swaying and shrieking with laughter, though it’d be impossible to explain what we found so funny. Okay, it’s not a perfect friendship. Now that I realize I’m harbouring two felons, it’s rather spectacularly flawed, actually. But hey, what isn’t?

Life is not black and white. It’s kind of grey – like the water in the washing machine – the washing that I hope Rory is still doing diligently. And then I think about my husband. Warm rays of morning sun reach my upturned face like kisses. The air is thick with the savoury tang of the sea. The briny effervescence makes me think of him, naked. A slanting tongue of sunlight warms my lap and my pulse gives a little surge of lust. And as the day begins to thicken into gold, I think that pretty soon, as soon as Rory has become good at Doing Sensitive Things With Snow Peas and has mastered the ironing – oh, the helium-filled happiness of being made love to by a man who adores you – and who has just hoovered your entire house – I might just go home for an orgasm.

Acknowledgements

This novel was completed with only a few minor injuries from girlfriends’ husbands. Needless to say, any likeness between any of the author’s girlfriends’ husbands and the husbands in this book is purely coincidental.

Thanks to my good friend and editor Suzanne Baboneau, my publisher, Ian Chapman and to the Ed-ocet missile of agents, Ed Victor. Thanks also to my first draft endurers, my sisters Liz and Jenny, Victoria Hislop, Michael Brian and Grainne Fox.

Naomi Felber and Mimi Greenburg were kind enough to help their shiksa friend with Yiddish-isms. Angie Mitchell and Siobhan McGrath ran a red pen through the manuscript for verisimilitude about the work of primary school teaching, as did Jeannie Mackie, Jane Belson and Mark Stephens for the family and criminal law, and Sarah Liddon for veterinary facts. In other words, if anything’s wrong you know who to blame!

Thanks also to Tabitha Peebles for all that typing and to my brothers-in-law, Craig Doyle and Tim Robertson for various last minute dashes to copiers and couriers. My heartfelt thanks to Pam Carter for appointing me the Savoy Hotel’s Writer in Residence, where I became seriously suite-wise and began this book.

And to Julius and Georgie, as ever.

About the author

Kathy Lette is a celebrated and outspoken comic writer with an inimitable take on serious current issues. She is the author of fourteen bestselling novels, including Puberty Blues, which was made into a major film and a TV miniseries, Mad Cows, which was also made into a film, starring Joanna Lumley, and How to Kill Your Husband (And other handy household hints), which was staged by the Victorian Opera. She pioneered smart, funny, feminist fiction and has been published in seventeen languages.

Kathy is an autodidact (clearly it’s a word she taught herself) but has honorary doctorates from Southampton and Wollongong universities, and a Senior Honorary Fellowship from Regent’s University London.

She is an ambassador for Plan International and the National Autistic Society UK. Kathy lives in Sydney and in London, and can often be found at The Savoy Hotel drinking a cocktail named after her. She cites her career highlights as once teaching Stephen Fry a word and Salman Rushdie the limbo, and scripting Julian Assange’s cameo in the 500th episode of The Simpsons.

Visit her website, www.kathylette.com, to read her blog, follow KathyLetteAuthor on Facebook, @KathyLette on Twitter and @kathy.lette on Instagram.

Also by Kathy Lette

HRT: Husband Replacement Therapy

After the Blues

Best Laid Plans

Courting Trouble

Love is Blind (But Marriage is a Real Eye-Opener)

The Boy Who Fell to Earth

Men: A User’s Guide

To Love, Honour and Betray

Nip ’n’ Tuck

Dead Sexy

Altar Ego

Mad Cows

Hit and Ms

Foetal Attraction

The Llama Parlour

Girls’ Night Out

Puberty Blues (co-author)

Praise for Kathy Lette and How To Kill Your Husband

(And Other Handy Household Hints)

‘In her customary breezy fashion, Lette crystallises all the pitfalls facing the modern working couple: work tensions, sexual tensions and, more darkly, what becomes of two people who have lost all respect for each other. But what makes Lette such a pro is that, as well as insight, she provides her reader with that rarest of things: a good plot’

The Times

‘With a cast of nymphomaniac new-agers, hard-boiled lawyers and power-crazed pedagogues, there’s never a doubt that this will be entertaining. Lette knows how to pace a plot. The result is a darkly funny, pun-filled satire on yummy-mummy culture, with humanity at its heart’

Daily Mail

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First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd in 2006

This edition published in Australia by Penguin Books in 2021