Picture this: you have a white picket fence, 2.5 kids and the man or woman of your dreams. Then one day, you see your ideal life crashing down and you can’t recover from it. Eventually you start to wonder, “Was I married to a stranger?”
Cal State Long Beach black studies professor Uche Lynn-Teresa Ugwueze tells a story in her new novel “Married to a Stranger” about how devastating it can be to believe you are in a perfect relationship when you later find out the life you thought you had was a lie. The novel really makes you think twice about your own relationships.
Ugwueze, a native of Nigeria, worked as a continuity announcer on radio and television, served as a producer and disc jockey with Cross River Radio in Calabar, Nigeria and the Enugu Broadcasting Service in Nigeria, and taught at both college and university levels in Africa and the United States. She has written novels such as “Wet in the Sun,” “The Blunt Blade” and “Tears Without Cry.”
Relationships go through their ups and downs, and the book definitely demonstrates that idea.
“Every relationship has its own problems,” Ugwueze said. “There are [no] relationships that are problem-free. I’m not saying that relationships are prone to problems, but sometimes relationships will have problems of deceit and this is what the book touches on.”
The book centers on two main characters, Ugo and Ephrem, a couple who have been married for seven years and adore each other. Chapter 5 explains how “Ephrem and Ugo’s romance has been one that elicited envy on the part of their friends. They were high school sweet hearts.”
As the story continues, the couple and their family continue to live in perfect bliss until Ugo senses infidelity in their marriage when a woman addresses Ephrem inappropriately. He denies he knows the woman and distracts Ugo as he “knelt down on his knee and asks his wife not to let what had just happen affect their romantic getaway.” A tragedy occurs, however, and Ugo finds out the entire truth about her husband’s life: She was married to a stranger.
Ugwueze explained that the novel was meant to show how Ephrem disguises a secret with Ugo being unaware of the situation.
“The novel is not necessarily built on a particular friend’s experience. It is a narrative of love and hopeful dreams deeply betrayed by the existence of the antagonist’s other family,” Ugwueze said. “What is painful to the reader is that the love the antagonist professes is built on his lie and his wife’s ignorance of that lie. His demonstrations of love turn out to be a well-thought out cover-up of mechanisms.”
In the novel, Ugo gets support from her family to help her cope through the tragedy. But my question is “How do you handle a lie?” The novel is a quick read and straight to the point, but after reading it you should be careful about whom you marry. For all you know, you just might be married to a stranger.
The novel is available in the University Bookstore for $13.49. It is also available online at www.authorhouse.com.
