What happens when love strikes twice--and the second time it does you are already satisfactorily, even happily, married?

Michelle Banyon has a successful career as a lifestyle guru and "efficiency consultant." She lives in Manhattan with her kind but thoroughly overworked husband, an international lawyer who spends far more time in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bombay than he does in their Fifth Avenue apartment. They are the perfect twenty-first-century couple: successful, attractive, self-sufficient, and understanding of the all-too-frequent absences that can sometimes make theirs a virtual marriage.

While lecturing in Texas, Michelle literally runs into Wilson Collins as she's backing out of a parking space. The handsome Texan is badly banged up and Michelle feels just awful. She performs one kindness after another as she tries to get him medical help and then get him home. A friendship blooms and, almost as quickly, love does, too.

Unlike everyone else in Michelle's life, Wilson has simple needs and desires and, to her immense surprise, she finds that she is someone very different when she’s with him. It’s not that she doesn't love her husband--she does. She just happens to love two men, and the second one wants to marry her, too.

Have you ever wondered how many different lives a person could live or how very different one's life might be if fate were to intervene at exactly the right moment? Could you be happy living two entirely different lives?

Sit back and enjoy Kate Lehrer's romantic, thought-provoking novel that is simultaneously smart and playful, poignant and compulsively readable.

"The heroine of Lehrer's fourth novel (Out of Eden, etc.) already has two personas — one as 47-year-old Michelle Banyon, chic wife of a successful Manhattan lawyer; the other as Daisy Strait, popular women's magazine columnist, consultant and public speaker who specializes in streamlining lives and closets — when she meets a man who makes her question who she really is. After literally knocking Wilson Collins off his feet (with her car) following a speaking engagement in Texas, Michelle surprises herself by falling in love. To Wilson, our heroine takes on a third persona (he calls her Mickey): sexual, feisty, needy, yet still fiercely independent. She also becomes a liar: Mickey can't bring herself to confess her true marital status. Michelle is painted as a good and moral person (though surprisingly untroubled by guilt), who agrees to marry Wilson rather than lose him. She gets into trouble when she tries to balance the competing demands of her long-term but often long-distance marriage to Steve and her more passionate relationship with Wilson in Texas, as well as her burgeoning career as Daisy, a woman who would never find herself in Michelle/Mickey's conundrum. Though the friendly, chatty narrator takes readers into her confidence with breezy ease, Lehrer's blithe answer to the novel's underlying question — is it really possible for a woman to have it all? — may strike many as unrealistic. (May) FYI: The author is married to Jim Lehrer and will embark on an 11-city author tour with him." Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.)

“What fun it is to read this book, to watch the imaginative plot unfold . . . to be touched by the poignancy of the characters.” —Elizabeth Strout, author of Amy and Isabelle

“A great escape.” —Newsweek

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Michelle Banyon is a 40-something New Yorker, fit, cosmopolitan, happily married to a wealthy international lawyer. But her alter ego is her true means of support: in a dark wig and Easy Spirit shoes, she's Daisy Strait, an organization counselor to over-burdened women nationwide. On one of Daisy's lecture gigs in Texas, Michelle backs her car over Wilson Collins, a handsome conservationist, and soon finds herself staying on his ranch to nurse him back to health. By the time he's cured, she's fallen head-over-heels in love — without mentioning that she already has a husband. Wilson is old-fashioned, though, and insists that they get married, so eventually Michelle Banyon (and Daisy Strait) becomes earthy, blue-jeaned Mickey Collins, too. Talk about a life in need of streamlining...

Reminiscent of Anne Tyler and Jeanne Ray, but with a contemporary, funny, compulsively readable sensibility all its own. Confessions of a Bigamist is part of a new wave of novels filling a growing niche in the market for fiction that appeals to today's smart, mature women.

A 40-something New Yorker — fit, cosmopolitan and happily married to a wealthy international lawyer — inadvertently falls for a Texas conservationist and things get complicated. Contemporary, funny and compulsively readable, it's part of a new wave of novels that appeal to today's smart, mature women.

KATE LEHRER is the author of three previous novels. She lives in Washington, D.C.