The Other Woman Manuscript Review - Grady Trela

The Other Woman Manuscript Review – Grady Trela

In her memoir The Other Woman, Karen Chadwick recounts her time as the personal assistant to Jane Blaffer Owen, a larger-than-life Texas oil heiress and philanthropist. While the memoir focuses on Chadwick’s Midwestern background and the unlikely path that led her to work for someone who simply referred to a first lady of the United States as “Barbara,” the book is also a close study on place; a large portion of the memoir explores New Harmony, Indiana, the adopted second home of Mrs. Owen where Chadwick worked for several years.

The small town’s history is as fascinating and tortuous as the Wabash River whose banks it rests on: It was founded by a strange German religious group in the early nineteenth century, purchased by a Welsh socialist and reformer a decade or so later, and reinvigorated in the mid-twentieth century by Texas oil money. Whereas most small American towns boast of having the world’s largest cornstalk, pig, or really any other farm staple for that matter, New Harmony is wonderfully different, and Chadwick’s secondary thesis is to show the reader this in unwavering detail.

The not quite odd-couple pairing of Chadwick and Owen that colors the book’s pages seems almost organic viewed alongside this quaint town’s own contradictions: buildings designed by Pritzker-prize winning architects in a one-traffic-light town, Hamptonsesque guest lists thirty miles from the Kentucky border. Chadwick’s memoir conjures the image of a strange, yet familiar, American town, and in a country homogenized by Walmart and McDonald’s, her book is a respite for anyone who yearns to remember what it feels like to spend time someplace real.

The Other Woman is a joy. In addition to peeling back the complex layers of small-town American life, the memoir offers readers glimpses into the lives of America’s one percent. While these impressions are fascinating, Chadwick never paints her subjects in the kind of broad strokes caricatures are made from. How could she? Her attention to detail is meticulous, and she captures the characters of her life as only a camera might, down to the briefest flicker of the eyes. 



Grady Trela
Resident of New Harmony, Indiana, for more than 20 years
B.A., Middlebury College, 2013