Invisible Woman
Katia LiefIn Invisible Woman, a dangerous secret held for too long between estranged best friends rises to the surface, & a long marriage comes apart with devastating consequences. Joni Ackerman’s decision to raise children, 25 years ago, came with a steep cost. She was then a pioneering filmmaker, one of the few women to break into the all-male Hollywood club of feature film directors. But she and her husband Paul had always wanted a family, & his ascending career at a premier television network provided a safety net.
Now they’ve recently transplanted to Brooklyn, so that Paul can launch a major East Coast production studio, when a scandal rocks the film industry & forces Joni to revisit a secret from long ago involving her friend Val. Joni is adamant that the time has come to tell the story, but Val & Paul are reluctant, for different reasons.
As the marriage frays & the friends spar about whether to speak up, Joni’s struggles with isolation in a new city, & old resentments about the sacrifices she made on her family’s behalf start to boil over. She takes solace, of sorts, in the novels of Patricia Highsmith—particularly the masterpiece Strangers on a Train, with its duplicitous characters and their murderous impulses—until the lines between reality & fantasy become blurred.
Invisible Woman is at once a literary thriller about the lies we tell each other (and ourselves), & a powerful psychological examination of the complexities of friendship, marriage, & motherhood.