The title of this book, “Cheat Day” has so many meanings everyone will be able to find a piece of themselves within. Cheat Day is a complicated, serious, funny look at one person’s relationship with life, love and food.
Kit and David met and fell in love in college. It was a comfortable love. Not a fireworks kind of love, but that was okay with Kit. David nurtured her sense of security, which was just what Kit needed. Now David is an architect and Kit works at her sister and cousin’s bakery called Sweet Cheeks.
Kit’s life is extremely predictable. She works, she diets, she quits work, she quits the diets she goes back to work. Clearly Kit is not very happy. She hates her job; she hates her body weight and although she knows her husband truly adores her, she sometimes does not know exactly how she feels about him.
This has been her pattern until a carpenter named Matt comes to the bakery to build some shelving and Kit and Matt have an instant attraction. Kit has never felt this way about anyone, not even her husband. Without hesitation, they begin an affair. But not only does Kit hide the affair from her husband, but she also hides her new diet experiment from Matt, which of course she is making her husband do with her. This new life-change will throw Kit’s boring life upside down. Kit is losing control.
Kit now finds this new chapter exciting, invigorating and loathsome. She begins to look at her husband in a different way, a way where everything about him seems to bother her. And of course, she begins to compare the two men. Where Matt and Kit’s sex life is incredible, her lack of sex with her husband is just another reason in her mind to continue the affair. By not telling Matt about her newest diet adventure, he assumes she has some weird food issues, which is not too far from the truth. At the same time, her husband and his family bend over backwards to assist Kit with her latest fad.
The novel delves deeply into the give and flow of a marriage, the yin and yang, the highs and lows. But cheating brings a new set of anxieties to the table. Sometimes when there are dips, it can be easy to look somewhere else, but it’s the love that makes you stay. So, is there any love left? The story is an exploration of other obsessions, such as jealousy and age. When you feel depressed about your life sometimes one’s world can spiral.
As the affair progresses, Kit’s life begins to freefall. Her weight down, her sex-life satisfying, she still feels sad and depressed. Then she must decide if she should tell her husband about the affair and all that will come with the truth. So many lives will be ruined including her husband’s family with whom Kit has always considered her family.
Kit has deprived herself for so long, of love, of food, of self-esteem. How will she be able to justify all she has done and been through? Is loving someone always a forever? Or is it possible to take it just day by day with some good days and perhaps some cheat days. Does anyone really know?
Lisa's Cubby 