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    Standard Deviation
    Unavailable
    Standard Deviation
    Unavailable
    Standard Deviation
    Audiobook10 hours

    Standard Deviation

    Written by Katherine Heiny

    Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    ‘I have rarely seen modern marriage reproduced so faithfully in print. It’s about love once the early romance has subsided. Hilarious’ Jojo Moyes, Woman and Home ‘Standard Deviation is a marvel’ Kate Atkinson ‘Addictive reading’ Mail on Sunday ‘A comic masterpiece’ Observer

    A divinely funny novel about the challenges of a good marriage, the delight and heartache of raising children, and the irresistible temptation to wonder about the path not taken.

    Graham Cavanaugh’s second wife, Audra, is everything his first wife was not. She considers herself privileged to live in the age of the hair towel, talks non-stop through her epidural, labour and delivery, invites the doorman to move in and the eccentric members of their son’s Origami Club to Thanksgiving. She is charming and spontaneous and fun but life with her can be exhausting.

    In the midst of the day-to-day difficulties and delights of marriage and raising a child with Asperger’s, his first wife, Elspeth, reenters Graham’s life. Former spouses are hard to categorize – are they friends, enemies, old flames, or just people who know you really, really well? Graham starts to wonder: How can anyone love two such different women? Did he make the right choice? Is there a right choice?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateMay 23, 2017
    ISBN9780008140991
    Unavailable
    Standard Deviation
    Author

    Katherine Heiny

    Katherine Heiny's fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Narrative,Glimmer Train, and many other places. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and children. This is her first book.

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    Reviews for Standard Deviation

    4/5

    150 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Not much happens but it was still easy and entertaining enough. Some previous reviewer commented that it feels like a TV series which I thought was a spot on description.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyable book. Everyone was on the spectrum. Main character was having an affair. Story about marriage, friendship and children.
    • 4/5
      The dry humor got me. Lord, Audra is a piece of WORK.
    • 4/5
      Oh my goodness, this book is an interesting take on relationships and parenting, so charming. I laughed out loud at several parts of the book, it was very amusing at times.
      I loved Graham's outlook, Audra's personality, and the parenting of Matthew, their child with Asperger's Syndrome. Such a sweet take on the ins and outs of marriage, friendship, and life.

      #StandardDeviation #KatherineHeiny
    • 4/5
      This book is quirky and kind of plotless, but the characters are fantastic and so very realistic and it's just full of perceptive reflections. I 4.5 stars loved it!
    • 3/5
      This is a light read about Graham, married to Audra and recently befriending his former wife, Elspeth. The two women are complete opposites. I enjoyed Audra as a character, but found her a little unbelievable. The book is funny at times...like a TV show more than a novel. The characters are pretty much set....they don't seem to develop much. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it as an amusing diversion.
    • 4/5
      A really interesting impression of a modern NY marriage from the husbands POV (which is extraordinary as written by a female author). I found it very engaging, particularly how they approached work/life issues, and their much loved only son's problems as a child with aspergers; as time goes on he develops his own circle of friends and moves on to a life with which he can cope; freeing them to be a couple once more.
    • 5/5
      The best character I've encountered all year is not the narrator of this hilarious novel. The story is brilliantly told by Graham, married to Audra, a decade younger than he, and they are the parents of ten year old Matthew, whose place on the Asperger spectrum is defined by his elevated status in the Origami Club, where he can fold Lang's Tarantula better than the fifty year old club members.Audra is an extreme extrovert, given to intense and inappropriate conversations with just about everyone in Manhattan. The guest room in their apartment is constantly populated by any number of friends and strangers gathered in by Audra, whose boundless curiosity and outspokenness is like honey for all the weird bees with hard luck stories. Graham admires and resents her mightily, and he tells the story of their family life with more liveliness, insight, and humor than could be expected from any straight man. DO NOT MISS THIS BOOK. Quotes:"Men only like clothing that reminds them of other, sexier clothing, and they only like the other, sexier clothing because they hope the woman wearing it will soon stop wearing it and get into bed with them.""Graham had come to believe that people were only happy when they could feel one emotion at a time. People in love were happy because being in love blocked all the other emotions out."
    • 3/5
      Amusing and fast but glad I don't know any of the people in it.
    • 5/5
      4.5 Love, marriage, infidelity and origami. Well the origami sound like an interesting twist but the others sound like many novels out there, common enough that I would have given this a pass if not for the reviews of a few of my friends on this site. So I started reading this, thinking a truly amusing book doesn't come by that often, so often I end up finding the humor is just corny. This book though is truly amusing, laugh out loud funny in parts and very easy to identify with. The second paragraph, " Here they are grocery shopping in Fairway on a Saturday morning, a normal married thing to do together---although, Graham could not help noticing, they were not doing it together. His wife, Audra, spent almost the whole time talking to people she knew---it was like accompanying a visiting dignitary of some sort, or maybe a presidential hopeful---while he did the normal shopping."Only the second paragraph and I was in love with this book. You see, my husband is Audra, truly. So then does this make me Graham? Well not exactly, though we do share some thoughts, actually quite a few, such as this one, " No one had cancelled Thanksgiving. Graham found that remarkable. Although maybe that was the most stressfulthing about holidays: they couldn't be cancelled. The holidays marched in unwanted and forced themselves upon you like Vikings invading a village, or a wet dog who shakes himself next to you."Add this to a son,who is on the higher end of the Asperger's scale, who falls in love with oregami, but changes in surprising ways, the oregami club itself and an ex wife his present wife wants to double date with and you have a surprising, modern day comedy of errors. It's not all surface fluff though, there are some valid insights into marriage and parenting and what we all hope to get from them, plus all we have to put into them. The adjustments we make daily and the changes we see as a result.A wonderful summer read, actually a wonderful read for anytime.
    • 4/5
      very funny story about Graham, who left his cool, collected wife, Elspeth, for Audra, who makes friends with everyone she meets and has no filter. Graham and Audra have a 10 year old son, Matthew, who has Asperger's. Not much really happens, but it is nevertheless extremely entertaining. Favourite paragraph:"Do you ever think," [Graham] said now, "that you and I might have Asperger's of some sort?""Oh, no", Audra said immediately. "Not at all" [...]"Although," she continued, frowning. "You do have that habit of saying north and south instead of left and right.""That's called 'having a sense of direction'", Graham said.
    • 5/5
      This was fun in so many ways---Graham is so appealing and Audra is just plain funny and fun to listen to as she talks...and talks...and TALKS!!!! Their son, Matthew, is in many ways the center of the story as their lives evolve around him with his Asperger's and, at least for some time, interest in origami. Of course, Elspeth has to be in there as a rather momentous part of the book as Graham's first wife. Heiny's imagination is incredible with the pictures she creates with her words, layer upon layer. When I reached "the end" I realized I could happily just keep reading about this family and their events even though Heiny reached an acceptable place to stop writing.