Books

The Controversial Book Written By Charles's Ex-Wife On 'Younger' Is Being Published IRL

by Kerri Jarema

Fans of the TV Land show Younger are about to be able to experience the show in a whole new way. Simon & Schuster is set to publish Marriage Vacation, the "fictional" novel from the show, on June 5, 2018. The title will definitely be familiar to viewers of the TV Land series: During season four of the hit series, Pauline Turner Brooks (played by Jennifer Westfeldt) writes a "tell-all novel" about her ex-husband, the publisher of Empirical Press, Charles (played by Peter Hermann.) Of course, it's our heroine Liza (played by Sutton Foster) who gets the career-making opportunity to edit the book. The only problem? She's in a secret romantic relationship with Charles — who's her boss! — and Marriage Vacation doesn't exactly paint him in the most flattering light. As if that wasn't enough drama, there's some saucy secrets revealed on page 58 that made the entire book more interesting — and more complicated.

Marriage Vacation by Pauline Brooks, $16, Amazon

The real-life book sounds like the perfect beach book, and even readers who have never seen a single episode of Younger will probably want to pop it into their tote bags immediately. Here's the deal: Marriage Vacation follows Kate Carmichael, an Upper East Side women with two adorable daughters, a husband who runs one of the most successful publishing companies in New York, and a seemingly perfect life.

But when Kate attends the wedding of her two of her oldest friends and reconnects with her successful former graduate school classmates, she suddenly sees her life in a different light. When the wedding weekend ends, instead of heading home to her husband and family, Kate gets on a plane and flies halfway around the world. She claims it’s just going to be for a week —two, at the most — so she can clear her head, get some writing done, and shake free of the feeling that time is passing her by. But just like Kate’s life, the adventure doesn’t go quite as planned.

This isn't the first time that Simon & Schuster has brought a fictional book from TV to real life bookstores. Marriage Vacation joins Snow Falling, a romance novel written by Jane Gloriana Villanueva (played by Gina Rodriguez) from the fan-favorite CW show, Jane the Virgin. And speaking from the perspective of someone who never got to read Jess Mariano's The Subsect from Gilmore Girls or Lucas Scott's A Kindness of Ravens from One Tree Hill, this is a publishing trend that I can definitely get behind.