It's (Mostly) His Fault: For Women Who Are Fed Up and the Men Who Love Them - Hardcover

Alter, Jane; Alter, Robert Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446577774 ISBN 13: 9780446577779

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2006

Synopsis

In the bestselling tradition of "The Rules" and "The Surrendered Wife" comes a controversial, empowering guide that says what women know already--that men are primarily responsible for marital problems.

About this title

About the Author:

I'm sitting here at the computer in my wife's office in our home in suburban Boston. It's the end of January, 2006. In two months my new book It's (Mostly) His Fault will be published, so there's an air of anticipation around here. It's a book about how to become a good husband. My wife Jane just ran into the room for a second to get something, and I asked her what I should say about myself in this biography. She said, "Say that you're a great guy and a good husband!" and then ran out. I was born on December 23, 1945 to Sylvia and Jack Alter in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second of two children. My father owned a small furniture store in Boston, my mother was a homemaker. When I was three, we moved to a suburb of Boston, where I grew up on the top floor of a two-family house and attended the public schools. I did well in school, and liked it. I was also a good athlete, and spent most of my boyhood on baseball fields and basketball courts and frozen ponds, playing football, baseball, basketball, and hockey with my friends-glory days!--as the seasons revolved. It was on those playing fields that I learned the voice that we males speak to each other in-boy to boy, man to man-a voice that men will listen to--and it's the voice I speak to husbands in in my therapy office, and the voice I wrote It's (Mostly) His Fault in. I graduated from high school in 1963, and went to Cornell University as a chemistry major because I wanted to be a veterinarian. Then the sixties fell on my head. Folk music, rock and roll, Dylan (The Freewheeling), Vietnam, demonstrations, drugs, more Dylan (Blonde on Blonde)-and before I knew it I wasn't a chemistry major anymore and didn't want to be a veterinarian, I was an English major and didn't have a clue what I wanted to be. I enjoyed reading great writers-Hemingway, Faulkner, Henry James, Thoreau-and decided I wanted to be a great writer. I spent my college years writing opinion pieces for the Cornell Daily Sun, short stories, and bad poems. In the fall of my senior year, I was walking across campus and saw a girl in a pink turtleneck sweater sitting on a low stone wall, gazing down. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen in my life. Waves of long blond hair around a quiet, oval face. Straight out of a Botticelli painting. I heard a voice say inside my head, "Someday I'm going to marry that girl." That was Jane. I graduated Cornell in 1967 and went to graduate school at Brandeis University to study literature. Jane (who was still at Cornell) and I found ourselves sitting next to each other on the steps of the Pentagon the night of the March on the Pentagon in October, 1967, and we talked while I rubbed her cold feet. I got my masters degree in 1968, and spent the next two years teaching writing to Brandeis freshmen. In 1970 Jane graduated Cornell and came to live with me outside of Boston. In 1971 we bought a blue Ford van and headed to the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts, where for the next five years we lived a country life. Jane started and ran a daycare center in Great Barrington, met with her women's group, gardened. I worked for a local farmer, got good with a chainsaw, drove a forklift in a plastics factory, ran a drop-in and counseling center for local teens, played hockey in a men's league. In the fall of 1972 we got married in the field behind Molly's barn. Our daughter Greta was born the next summer. We loved being parents. I was still listening to Dylan (Blood on the Tracks), and still wanted to be a great writer, and was still writing essays and short stories and bad poems, except for two poems I wrote about Greta that were good. In 1976 we moved to Spring Hill, a conference center high on a hill in a small town fifty miles west of Boston, where a group of new-age, spiritually-minded psychotherapists from Boston were putting on nationally known weekend workshops called Opening the Heart. After training in the Heart-Centered Method of counseling, Jane

From Publishers Weekly:

Longtime couples therapist Alter stops short of promising women who ask their husbands to read his guide that "he'll read it, and like it, and get it, and change, and then things'll get a lot better in your marriage," knowing from his 22 years as a counselor that his intended audience-boneheaded husbands-won't change if they don't want to, but those who do could do much worse than to take Alter's advice. Alter holds husbands accountable for many problems that plague marriages and relates to his male clients in a tough manner that sometimes angers them. The most useful guidance is a suggested "Move" at the end of each chapter, an overture husbands can make to improve at everything from listening to their wives, appreciating their wives' anger and understanding their own sexuality (read: "Please touch it."). Though some "Moves" are less helpful than others (he simply recommends husbands with addictions to alcohol, drugs, or pornography "break all your consuming relationships with substances and behaviors"), most are small, yet meaningful, and worth giving a shot before looking for a divorce attorney.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0446577774
• ISBN 13: 9780446577779
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384