Award-winning author Stacey D'Erasmo tells a haunting and emotionally
affecting story about a woman trying to rebuild her life after her
husband's arrest, and what she knew--or pretended not to know-- about
where their family's money came from.
After her husband Alan's decades of financial fraud are exposed,
Suzanne's wealthy, comfortable life shatters. Alan goes to prison.
Suzanne files for divorce, decamps to a barely middle-class
Massachusetts beach town, and begins to create a new life and identity.
Ignoring a steady stream of calls from Norfolk State Prison, she tries
to cleanse herself of all connections to her ex-husband. She tells
herself that he, not she, committed the crimes.
Then Alan is released early, and the many people whose lives he ruined
demand restitution. But when Suzanne finds herself awestruck at a major
whale stranding, she makes an apparently high-minded decision that
ripples with devastating effect not only through Alan's life as he tries
to rebuild but also through the lives of Suzanne and Alan's son, Alan's
new wife, his estranged mother, and, ultimately, Suzanne herself.
When damage is done, who pays? Who loses? Who is responsible?
With biting wisdom, The Complicities examines the ways in which the
stories we tell ourselves--that we didn't know, that we weren't there,
that it wasn't our fault--are also finally stories of our own deep
complicity.
