The Other Side of Charm: Your Memoir
When Helen Beverly reunites with her childhood crush, she thinks she might start believing in destiny. Wyatt Sanders, a college decathlete with a seductively elusive sensitive side, has grown up into a flannel-wearing charmer who can make her laugh more than she's laughed in years. He takes her dancing, loves to make dinner for her at midnight, and brings her more excitement than she's ever known. There are nights on a blanket under shooting stars, parties with family and friends that sprawl across the lawn, and long walks on quiet country roads that last all afternoon. They marry quickly, and everyone they know praises and celebrates them as a couple. She feels like her dreams have come true and tries hard to keep them alive--even when Wyatt stops coming home at night, even when she catches him in lies, even when he pins her to the doorframe. What begins as one woman's sweetest romance quickly turns, with marriage, into a series of crushing events that leave her bruised and hollow, eventually losing her sense of reality as she desperately clings to the ideals she tries so hard to live by. Her story is both true and heartbreaking, and it raises questions about failed support systems, aggression, parenting, divorce, trauma, and the limits of human recovery when there is no escape.