Mr. Wrong
edited by Harriet Brown
Ballantine Books, 2007
251 pages

Just in time for another torturous Valentine’s Day comes “Mr. Wrong,” a collection of 24 essays by notable female writers who all recount stories of less-than-perfect relationships.

Edited by Harriet Brown, the collection captures every stereotype of failed relationships, along with a few surprises. In “Goodbye to the Gaiety,” Marilyn Jaye Lewis writes of being married to a gay man. Sara Ekks unabashedly admits that she married a man addicted to bondage porn in “I Married a Wanker!” and Robin Westen remembers her hard fall for the leader of a cult in “The Guru.”

All of these women are smart, like the beautiful and seemingly perfect female friends everyone has who consistently fall for alcoholics, emotionally absent musicians and men who still live with their mothers at age 40. In the introduction, Harriet Brown asserts that reading about other people’s love mistakes is “deliciously cathartic.” Reading about other women’s “Mr. Wrongs” helps readers to chalk up their own love mistakes to learning experiences, which somehow makes them easier to live with. Brown points out that falling in love with the wrong man breeds intense self-examination.

The most interesting feature of the book is that it provides a bird’s eye view into the intimate lives of the writers. None of Jane Smiley’s readers otherwise would have known about her short-lived marriage to a six-foot-nine socialist while reading “A Thousand Acres.” Similarly, Audrey Niffenegger’s engaging essay “The Composite Boyfriend” isn’t about any particular individual, but assures women everywhere that writing as fabulous a novel as “The Time Traveler’s Wife” somehow didn’t make Niffenegger a superhuman and exclude her from heartbreak.

“Most of us see it coming and still don’t get out of way,” Brown writes of parasitic men. “We see the red flags and we say to ourselves, Gee, this seems like a bad idea. And then we do it anyway.” Brown’s theory is that women project what they think is lacking in themselves onto men, and then are disappointed to find that Mr. Wrong won’t complete them. The results, however, make for some heartfelt, hilarious and often cringe-worthy stories, compiled in “Mr. Wrong” for an easy and fun read.