When reading 'The Bigamist' it's far too easy to think the author must have been incredibly gullible or stupid to have fallen for her 'husband's lies - especially when he starts to bleed her dry for money - but I had the impression that Will was such an expert liar that he really did believe the lies he told and the games that he played.
This is a fascinating read. In the same way that you can't look away from a car crash, it's hard to stop reading as the lies pile up and the layers of deceit are unraveled. Mary TT is not stupid but I could see how she fell into the traps set by her bigamist fantasist 'husband'.
So why only 2 stars? It's not in ANY way to denigrate the suffering of Mary TT or any of the other multiple women abused by this man. It's just that a great story doesn't always make a great book. This reads like the kind of article you might find in one of those horrible weekly scandal magazines - the 'I accidentally married my cat' or 'How I failed to notice my husband was a woman' articles you see in 'Take a Break' and similar. As such an article it would have been compelling but it's a bit of a stretch as a full book.
There's a good reason that people who've had terrible experiences hire ghost writers because great stories don't necessarily make great books. See, I just did what I'm about to complain about; I repeated myself. And this book IS really repetitive. After the first couple of times Mary arranged to meet up with Will and he didn't show up, you don't need another half dozen examples. After the first time he begged for money and promised to pay it back, you don't need a dozen more examples to show you that he's a 'wrong-un'.
I liked Mary a lot but the book needed some severe editing so that her powerful message of suffering and recovery and her warnings to other young single mothers wouldn't get lost among all the groundhog days of repetitive abuse. Or it needed a professional writer to tighten it up a bit. That said, I kept reading and I was hooked because hers is a fascinating story but we know the ending before we even start and it's all just a matter of watching that multiple pile-up car crash happen on the page in front of us.
I wish her well - and all the other women he abused and (shockingly) continues to abuse - and occasionally wish that justice might be a bit more direct than the system allows. As the old joke about castrating tom cats with two bricks goes "It doesn't hurt so long as you keep your fingers out of the way"
In April 2006, Mary Turner Thomson received a call that blew her life apart. The woman on the other end of the line told her that Will Jordan, Mary's husband and the father of her two younger children, had been married to her for fourteen years and they had five children together.
The Bigamist is the shocking true story of how one man manipulated an intelligent, independent woman, conning her out of £200,000 and leaving her to bring up the children he claimed he could never have.
It's a story we all think could never happen to us, but this shameless con man has been doing the same thing to various other women for at least 27 years, spinning a tangled web of lies and deceit to cover his tracks.
How far would you go to help the man you love? How far would he go to deceive you? And what would you do when you found out it was all a lie?
Yes its very difficult