Today’s Washington Post has a review of asha bandele’s Something Like Beautiful: One Single Mother’s Story, something of an update from her memoir The Prisoner’s Wife, which was about her extremely ill-advised decision to marry a man (with whom she had a child) who is serving a life sentence.

Seriously, despite her wonderful way with words, in reading The Prisoner’s Wife, could you stop rolling your eyes in disbelief even for a moment? I’m a sappy romantic, but please. Did you have any doubt that the relationship would fail? Did you wonder how she could be so credulous and what kind of childhood she had that nobody told her how seductive a man who has nothing to lose could be and sound?

In Something Like Beautiful, we learn that bandele is in fact (ding ding ding!) a deeply wounded person who has had some bad breaks.

Sandwiched between a dreamy preamble and epilogue, the middle third of the book does tell a story and it’s one that deserves to be heard. After her breakup with Rashid, Bandele embarks on an affair with another partner, also too-good-to-be-true but with one glaring defect: He’s physically abusive. As she describes her subsequent drift into a white wine-fueled, solitary depression, Bandele matches her lyricism with heartrending honesty. Finally acknowledging her deep wounds — from having been adopted at the age of 3, from being sexually abused as a young child, from the failures of her first two marriages (there was an early union, before Rashid) — she seeks solace in therapy.

I’m not sure this one will go on my reading list.

After reading The Prisoner’s Wife, I think I unconsciously added bandele — whose poetry I knew before the memoir — to the list of people about whom I wanted to know less in order to continue to enjoy their work. In that spirit, I think I’ll take her uneven-but-worthwhile novel Daughter as her best contribution to date to the larger conversation about motherhood.