She’s been called the harpy, the Jezebel, the Lorelei, the bitch…and other choice names. In truth, she is someone’s daughter, mother, friend, confidante. She seduces husbands, breaks up marriages, and occasionally becomes a stepmother. Sometimes, she is even a victim. So who is this creature who arrives like a wrecking ball to destroy lives and families? She is the Other Woman—but she’s only half the story.

For every Other Woman, there is a wife or girlfriend whose relationship has been devastated—or surprisingly—blissfully liberated. Some women find themselves playing both roles during the course of a lifetime.

With 21 insightful essays from the list of America’s most respected and award-winning female authors, this collection explores the highly personal, sometimes anguished, sometimes hilarious, but always compelling experiences of women on both sides of these highly charged and emotional situations.

Reviews:

The Other Woman may be a topic of eternally prurient interest, but the main attraction of this strong collection of 21 personal essays is the top-drawer writers such as Diana Abu-Jaber, Laurie Stone and Susan Cheever. Narrated from the point of view of the marriage wrecker or that of the wife who suffers the anguish of triangulation in a trusting relationship, these tales drip with the bitterness of experience. In "Palm Springs," Mary Jo Eustace records the shattering moment when she was stranded on vacation with her small children, and her husband revealed he had fallen in love with his movie co-star. Jane Smiley's terrifically funny "Iowa Was Never Like This" describes the incorrigible but enchanting litany of love's fickle nature. Dani Shapiro's "The Mistress" recreates her several years' affair with the much older stepfather of her college friend—and the lies she finally uncovered by hiring a detective. And in her plainspoken "The Uterine Blues," Connie May Fowler wonders when women are going to smarten up and stop sabotaging one another by sleeping with each other's husbands. The anthology features tales from women of all ages, lesbians and women who have been abused physically: it is a candid and truly fascinating look at how men and women love and hurt.

Publishers Weekly

"Invite the bitch to dinner" is one wickedly brash survival strategy in The Other Woman: (subhead), edited by (etc.). Among the star turns in this unusually frank and furious collection of essays are Pam Houston's "Not Istanbul," a hypothetical journey into an impossibly complicated relations ("Here's the thing about the other woman. She lives inside your head") and Connie May Fowler's "The Uterine Blues," a savory bit of rancor from a woman scorned.

O (Oprah) Mag., June issue

The same delicious guilty pleasure a person experiences when a girlfriend confides a story from her life (only after extracting the promise: never tell) is what a reader has in store, opening Victoria Zackheim’s addictively readable collection of true life stories about The Other Woman. I picked it up thinking I’d read one or two, and two hours later, I was still turning pages. Poignant, chilling, occasionally heartbreaking, and all true.

Joyce Maynard, author of The Usual Rules and Internal Combustion

With a generous hand and an artful eye, Victoria Zackheim beckons forth the Other Woman and invites her to unveil herself in this moving and exhilarating assortment of essays. Friend, co-worker, neighbor, even self, the Other Woman is almost always a surprise, but the biggest surprise of all is that this volume offers so many unexpected glimpses of her.

Abby Frucht, author of Polly's Ghost

The essays in The Other Woman are a fascinating, moving and sometimes frightening window into a subject of which fascinates, moves and frightens us—infidelity. I read this book in a single sitting—I couldn't put it down.

Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits