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Review

"One can easily imagine the ladies of “The View” grilling Washington journalist Carol Ross Joynt about the financial and emotional soap opera chronicled in Innocent Spouse, her memoir of love, death, betrayal, survival, re-invention and major name-dropping."--_The Washington Post_

"There are many memoirs by women who don't know their husbands until they die...but none has the brutal irony of "Innocent Spouse...What makes this memoir exceptional is Carol Joynt's unending honesty. She doesn't spare herself --- on many pages, she really does come off like an idiot...But she perseveres. She learns. She gets it right."--Jesse Kornbluth, HeadButler.com

"When a husband dies suddenly he often leaves his widow holding the bag. The choice is to crumble or carry on. Carol Joynt not only carried on but she came through victorious."--Joan Rivers

"Carol Ross Joynt is more than an Innocent Spouse; her indomitable spirit prizes through in this compelling memoir of growth and accomplishment. In the flood of widow memoirs, hers will stand out as a story of overcoming financial ruin, professional and personal deceptions, as well as losing the man she believed was the love of her life."–Sally Ryder Brady, author of A Box of Darkness

"For those who read The Pilot's Wife by Anita Shreve and wondered how a loving husband could possibly keep a secret life hidden from his family, wonder no more: Carol Joynt reveals in sad and searing detail how it can happen and the price she, as a wife, had to pay to save herself and her young son."--bestselling author Kitty Kelley

"A searing personal journey where the pages fall away from one’s hand like meat from a bone. Ms. Joynt takes on her life with both a hatchet and a scalpel and is unafraid to turn an unerring spotlight on herself, examining the flaws and mistakes from every angle. Yet what emerges from thi...

Product Description

What would you do if, just weeks after your spouse's sudden death, you found out he was keeping secrets? Big secrets. Secrets that could cost you millions of dollars—and brand you as a criminal. Innocent Spouse is an eye-opening memoir that asks a provocative and disturbing question: Is it possible to really know and trust someone, even your spouse?

Carol Ross Joynt was a successful television producer in Washington, D.C. Her husband, Howard, owned Nathans, a legendary restaurant in Georgetown. From an outsider’s perspective, Carol and Howard lived a fairy-tale life—spending weekends at their Chesapeake Bay estate, rubbing shoulders with New York’s and Washington’s elite, and raising their beloved son, Spencer. But everything changed with Howard’s sudden death when Spencer was only five years old.

Like any widow, Carol was devastated because she lost the love of her life and her son’s father. But soon Carol had much more to cope with than her grief and new life as a single parent. As she was forced to take over her family’s legal and financial responsibilities, as well as run Howard’s restaurant on her own, Carol discovered that her husband had secrets, and one of them, an almost $3 million debt to the IRS, threatened to derail her entire life. And even though Carol didn’t know anything about the tax fraud—finances had always been Howard's department—no one cared. As his surviving spouse, legally, Carol was responsible.

In Innocent Spouse, Carol shares her harrowing struggles with the IRS, as manipulative business colleagues and lawyers assumed the worst of her and friends turned their backs when her name became associated with scandal. Fighting to maintain a stable life for her son, Carol had to figure out how to preserve Spencer’s happy memories of his father, even as their lives were shattered by his deceptions and lies.

But as Carol picks up the pieces of her fractured life and copes with her sadness and anger, she learns to become something she’d never been before: self-sufficient. Poignant, eye-opening, and at times heartbreaking, Innocent Spouse is ultimately an inspiring story of strength and newfound independence in the face of loss and betrayal.