After I finished reading and reviewing my last book, which I bought recently and read soon after purchasing, I decided it was time to tackle one of the books that had been sitting on my Kindle app for years. I have a habit of buying books, but then I don’t get around to reading them for a long time. I have quite a few that have been waiting for ages to be read, and while I’m sure the authors are just grateful for another sale, I really do need to read what I’ve got. Today’s review represents a book I bought in late September 2016, but am just now finishing reading in January 2020. I used to be a much faster reader than I am today. My eyes were better and I didn’t fall asleep so easily ten years ago. I guess my buying habits haven’t adapted with the times.

I don’t remember what compelled me to buy Maggie Kneip’s book, Now Everyone Will Know: The Perfect Husband, His Shattering Secret, My Rediscovered Life, which was published in November 2015. Maybe I saw an article in the news about her. It could have just as easily been a suggestive sell from Amazon. I am pretty vulnerable to those. I do love true stories, too, and Maggie’s story is definitely real and relatable, especially if you were around in the 1980s, when everyone was terrified of AIDS. I was a child in the 80s, so I remember that terror well. We talked a lot about AIDS in school, and there were a lot of books, movies, and magazine articles about the deadly disease that struck people in their prime and killed them quickly. Ryan White, the hemophiliac boy who got a tainted blood transfusion that caused his deadly case of AIDS and famously fought for the right to keep going to school, was a year older than I am.

On June 19, 1990, three days after I graduated from high school, Maggie Kneip gave birth to her son, Dan. Dan is her second child. Her first child is Caroline, who was two years old when her brother was born. Maggie’s husband, John Andrew, was a well regarded journalist for The Wall Street Journal. The family lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, and it seemed like Dan’s birth would be icing on the cake of what must have seemed to most people like a charmed life. John and Maggie met in 1984, married in 1986, and by 1990, seemed to be living the American Dream.

But John Andrew had kept secrets from his wife, and just a couple of weeks after baby Dan was born, John became extremely ill. His doctors told Maggie that John would probably be dead in two weeks. Maggie, who had been a dancer and a singing waitress who worked with many brilliant people who’d contracted AIDS, seemed to know instinctively what was wrong with her “straight” husband. John had been suffering from nagging illnesses. He’d had rashes, a persistent cough, weight loss, and most humiliatingly, uncontrollable diarrhea. On July 10, 1990, John and Maggie were out to dinner when John couldn’t distinguish the difference between an ashtray and a ketchup bottle. Somehow, Maggie knew that her husband, a man with brilliant red hair and cornflower blue eyes who resembled the actor, David Caruso, had been leading a double life, even though his doctors hadn’t tested him for AIDS because he was presumably “straight”.

Though doctors had believed John would die within weeks of his collapse, his actual death occurred nine months later. In the meantime, Maggie cared for him. She worried about her own health and that of their children’s; fortunately, none of them were infected with the virus that causes AIDS. In a weird way, genital herpes might have even saved Maggie from her husband’s fate. Because John had herpes, the couple frequently used condoms when they had sexual intercourse. By March 1991, John was dead, and Maggie was left to take care of herself and their children. But she was doing so at a time when people were still ignorant and petrified about AIDS. She battled ignorance and even vindictiveness among her peers and her children’s schoolmates.

In the weeks after John’s death, Maggie packed up or threw away his beautiful, “bespoke” suits, expensive shoes, fancy ablutions, and memorabilia. Her children didn’t know their father. They rarely spoke of him and, in fact, Maggie went looking for a “replacement father”, whom she eventually found in a Georgetown graduate named Dave who read children’s books to the kids and used different voices for each character. Maggie went back to work in children’s publishing and raised her children. It wasn’t until twenty-five years after John’s death that she finally felt free to talk about him and tell their story.

My thoughts

I’m of a mixed mind about this book. On one hand, I found it very readable and engaging. I finished it within a couple of days. I probably could have finished it in a sitting, since it’s under 200 pages, but there’s that “falling asleep while reading” problem I mentioned earlier in this post. It doesn’t matter if the subject matter is amazing. I still drop off when I read sometimes, which slows down my progress. Last night, I managed to get through a large portion of the book and I easily finished it this morning.

The first half of Now Everyone Will Know was fast paced and gripping. Maggie Kneip has a colorful writing style and uses creative similes and metaphors that, most often, are clever and thought provoking. But then, once John has died, and she’s picking up the pieces of her life, it seems like the book’s pace becomes sped up somehow. She crams a lot of action into too few pages, and it starts to feel a bit rushed and glossed over.

I think Maggie Kneip could have added more detail to her story beyond her husband’s death. She adds a couple of very specific incidents that are jarring: a “friend” calling her children’s pediatrician and CPS on her with “concerns” that the children are being “abused”. Fortunately, the child welfare worker who visited her was smart enough to realize the kids were not being abused. Then there was the incident in which her daughter, Caroline, told her class that her father died of AIDS and the teacher called Maggie to gently suggest that they “find another way” to tell people about John’s death. These were good incidents to illustrate why Kneip felt she couldn’t discuss her husband’s death.

There was another incident in which her infant son, Dan, was burning up with fever and Maggie worried that he might have AIDS. After hours, she convinced an elderly doctor who ran an office out of his garage to take a look at the baby. When the doctor learned that the baby’s father had died of AIDS, he pretty much kicked them out of his office and they wound up at the emergency room, where Dan was diagnosed with an ear infection. This is another story that sheds light on how difficult it was for Maggie and her kids after John died. But there aren’t enough of these anecdotes, and Kneip still had the resources to get good healthcare and access to excellent schools for her kids. A lot of Americans would not have been able to do that, due to finances and the ignorance of locals (as in Ryan White’s case).

Kneip doesn’t delve much into how she felt about learning John’s secret. She expresses a few brief comments of outrage at the betrayal of being lied to and exposed to a deadly illness. But then, nothing… most of the rest of her book is about what a great guy John was, even though he was having unprotected sex with men while having sex with her. Personally, in her position, I would have been outraged. But she doesn’t really write too much about it, so I didn’t get much of a sense of how upset she was. I got the impression she was initially shocked, then briefly angry, then set in motion to pick up the pieces. Only toward the end of the book, when she describes learning sad songs for a cabaret act (as a form of therapy) did I get an inkling of what she might have been feeling over the plus two decades beyond her husband’s death.

Then, Kneip sort of brushes over her troubles finding someone to date, with only one or two examples of men who were put off by the fact that her husband had died of AIDS. I can only think of one very brief note she makes about a boorish man she met on a blind date who quipped, “Just my luck. I go out on a blind date with someone whose husband died of AIDS.” Were there no others? Because if that was the only embarrassing moment she had in her dating life, it seems pretty tame. I’ve probably had more embarrassing dating moments than she has, and I never even dated very much.

Then, she finds Dave, the “replacement dad”, whose only faults were his love of drinking (which she writes that he stopped “cold”) and his cat, whom she says was pawned off on someone else. She writes of drinking two glasses of wine while pregnant (not that I think it’s a big deal, but some readers will), and riding in the car with her son in her arms because screw the carseat (again, not personally a big deal to me, but might make some readers think she’s terribly negligent and self-centered). According to her book, Kneip broke up with Dave for awhile, but then got back together with him. They aren’t married, which is certainly their choice, but it does seem like she doesn’t realize that she’s actually had it pretty good. Dave willingly helped her raise her children, to the point of attending PTA meetings, and he helped her care for her aging parents. Maggie is somewhat bitter, because she’s the breadwinner who’s tired and unable to do things she enjoys. But Dave is taking care of her children by another man and isn’t even legally a part of their family. They’d temporarily split up, mainly because Dave wanted to stay in Connecticut and Maggie wanted to move back to New York City. Because they weren’t married, this was easy enough for them to do… and then later, they reconnected when Maggie apparently decided Connecticut wasn’t so bad, after all.

Prior to meeting Dave, Maggie Kneip still dated, was able to find work that paid the bills– enough so that she could move to Westport, Connecticut, and sent her children to excellent colleges. She took tap dancing lessons, joined book clubs, and started running in marathons. She describes looking like Farrah Fawcett at one point just after her husband’s death, showing up to clean out his office wearing a mini skirt and admitting to want to attract attention from men.

I think of friends of mine– middle aged women who find themselves alone, out of work, dealing with their own health problems and their aging parents, struggling to pay their most basic bills, and with little hope of finding relief from the stresses of daily life. I have a friend who recently divorced her husband because he has a traumatic brain injury and she was trying to raise their child alone while also caring for him. She does have friends and family, but her situation compared to Maggie’s seems a lot more difficult. My friend has been looking for full time work and has few resources. She could probably write a book herself, and it would probably be a more compelling story about driving on through a crisis.

By contrast, when John died, Maggie was left with life insurance, stocks, and property John had inherited in New Hampshire. Yes, she had to go back to work, but she apparently had family and friends who were willing and able to help her. And though she writes of feeling alienated due to her husband’s AIDS related demise, I just don’t get the sense that it was all that bad. Based on her own descriptions, it sounds like Maggie Kneip was still attractive enough to find other partners. Indeed, she found one who was apparently a very good match– even according to her friends, who congratulated her on landing her “catch”. Yes, I agree that she went through a terrible ordeal, but it seems that she was able to pick herself up with admirable ease. Maybe it wasn’t like that in reality, but that’s how her story comes across to me, even as she laments about the “stay-at-home” moms she encountered in Connecticut who didn’t have to work or worked part-time from home. I mean, at least she found a job that paid well enough for her to get back on her feet and even have a choice to move to areas where the schools are excellent. Many people are not so fortunate and have to make do with much less.

While it’s worth mentioning that back in the 90s, people were terribly stigmatized by AIDS, things have changed a lot since then. AIDS is no longer an automatic death sentence. Younger readers who weren’t around back in that time might have trouble understanding… or maybe the book will just serve as sort of an anecdotal history for those who weren’t around when accommodations weren’t made for people with HIV or AIDS.

I do think Maggie Kneip is a good writer, although I did notice that she used the exact same colorfully turned sentence twice. How? Because I read it twice within hours this morning. At one point, Kneip writes about how she took her children to their father’s grave in New Hampshire, describing how the stood at attention in sneakers, “offering up tired daisies for their father’s grave”. Within a couple of chapters, she uses the very same description when she writes of her and the children visiting family in New Hampshire, picking blueberries, hiking, and “offering up tired daisies for their father’s grave”. Had the description not been so descriptive and interesting, I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but I got such an image when I read it the first time that it stuck out like a sore thumb the second time I encountered it.

If I were going to rate this book, I think I’d give it 3.5 stars on a scale of five. Kneip has a gift for creative writing and uses some entertaining and clever descriptions in her book, but to me, it just seems like an effort that was both rushed and incomplete. And, I’ve gotta say, as an average woman of average means, I find her tone a bit clueless and self-pitiful. I’m sure she’s not really like that, though, and had she fleshed out this book a bit more, I would not have come away with that impression. Certainly her discovery of John Andrew’s “secret life” and the betrayal she felt was very dramatic and hurtful to her. If she had spent a bit more time on that story, as well as the one that unfolded immediately after John’s death, I might be more convinced as to why this book needed to be written.

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