Janie Kirk
“What have I done?”
This is the thought that tortures Janie Kirk at the start of Four Wives.
Janie is the picture perfect suburban housewife. She’s got four kids, a successful husband, and a completely renovated body. But her marriage has, in many ways, died, leaving a large piece of her unfulfilled.
When we first meet Janie, she’s coming home late at night, sneaking into her house. She pauses at the back door, not yet able to enter because her mind is still reeling from the affair she has just begun. She can see the little things inside that remind her of her life as a wife and mother, but when she closes her eyes she can feel the way her body came alive again after so many years of being dead.
So she thinks, “what have I done” because she knows she will want more, and yet she loves her children, her house, her entire life in every other way.
Janie is friends with Gayle Haywood Beck, one of the wealthiest women in Hunting Ridge, and it is through this friendship that Janie is brought onto the benefit committee for a local women’s clinic where she socializes with the other women in Four Wives.
Throughout the novel, Janie makes choices that many of us would never make. Yet, at the same time, she is desperately trying to save her marriage and keep her life in tact. The struggle she faces between her desires as a woman and her desires for her family is both real and, I think, very familiar to a lot of women.
