I acquired this book without a cover for free a while back, and decided for the hell of it to read it, as it was a change of pace from the historical or sci-fi/fantasy books I had mostly been reading lately. I think I am experiencing the Publishing Gods' justice for violating the warning inside most paperbacks regarding books in that condition.

This is not the author’s first or only book. She wrote a whole ton of them, and the first couple of reviews on Amazon were really positive. I don’t understand how those things can be true, because I read this book.

So I’m going to spoil “Remember When” for you guys. You’re welcome.

Diana, the heroine, is a teenager with a crush on Cole, who’s putting himself through college working in her friend’s father’s stables. Diana is not like the other girls her age with their blatant and off-putting come-ons to the rugged & hunky Cole, she is classy and really mature for a teenager, and good looking too. Diana shares her friends’ crush on Cole, but is too poised and dignified to flirt or chase after him. For the record, Diana and Cole are 14 & 21, respectively. This non-flirtation goes on for a couple of years, and then Cole gets in a Potiphar’s Wife situation, and is fired. This happens in a vacuum, apparently, because there is absolutely no indication that Diana or her family is ever even aware of where her crush disappears to, in circumstances that should have been fairly scandalous.

Skip forward a whole bunch of years, and it’s now the 90s. Cole is a hard-driving businessman who buys companies and makes them profitable, and is hugely rich and successful and might be lonely, if he had soft, tender emotions, but he’s way too badass for that. He has lots of sex, of course, but doesn’t want to settle down. All he does is work, and his employees sort of worry about him, or about being worked to death by him, swapping tales of Cole’s midnight phone calls with brilliant business ideas or discoveries. If only the poor man could be shown that there is more to life than profit and business conquests! But who could do such a thing?

Cue Cole turning on the TV to see Diana being interviewed. Diana is also a hugely successful businessthing, who is just as well known in business circles as Cole (except by Cole, who is apparently the only person who’s never heard of her or her business), but more beloved and famous with the general public. As Cole’s current sexual conquest explains to him, Diana runs a Martha-Stewart-type home decorating business. The talent in this company is her family, while she does the business & marketing and all that stuff. Her father died when she was fresh out of college, leaving the family with nothing, so Diana put her kinfolk’s arts and craft skills to work, with DIY projects and lifestyle magazines and a TV show, and now they are HGTV (or the 90s equivalent) celebrities. But for some reason, Diana is the public face as well as the business brains of the outfit, even though she is constantly belittling her contributions, and remains in awe of the working class skills of her proletarian family. Oh, and she too has made enemies, because in Texas, they don’t cotton to a woman being successful and running a business and becoming “more famous than the menfolk.” Cole’s girlfriend explains how most women resent and envy Diana, and while the girlfriend herself doesn't, she’d still trade places with Diana, because she hates being pampered and patronized. And then she begs Cole to have his children. She vanishes from the story after that, I assume because Cole doesn't find split-personality disorder to be a turn-on.

Anyway, over in Diana’s life, she’s engaged, but her fiancé elopes with a teenage European heiress & model (is that a thing? Isn’t the point of being an heiress that you don’t need to get a job? Particularly such an exploitative job? ). According to Diana’s expository henchperson, the jilting is a business disaster, and since it’s a family business, it will impact the family so this is not a purely selfish concern either! Whatever she does to rectify the situation is for her family, got it?

It turns out that getting jilted for an 18 year old is not good for the image of a 31 year old businesswoman, if her business is all about selling an ideal of domesticity, and Diana’s company has portrayed her as the embodiment of the Having It All dream. By being rejected in favor of a woman who was pooping in diapers when this novel began, she is exposed as being unable to have both a happy marriage and great career at the same time.

She is caught out for the sin of needing to concentrate too much on her job! The stock is going to take a sharp hit, because who wants to waste money investing in a company whose CEO & founder prioritizes the company over her personal life, and works too hard without taking time for herself? I know I personally invest to enable strangers to have well-rounded personalities, not to make money off their hard work.

Anyway, losing her man makes her whole company look fake, like a televangelist getting caught with hookers, or the head of Weight Watchers getting fat (again), so the company is going to be in trouble and Diana and her mother, grandparents and sister are going to starve. Diana’s whole family of healthy, sane, educated adults with a wide array of practical skills will not be able to make a living once the sister/daughter/granddaughter who has been running their business is exposed as not living up to the lifestyle. Yes, I know, but that's how the book is treating this crisis. Oh, and everyone is going to laugh at Diana at the big charity auction tonight!

Meanwhile, Cole has his own problems. Everyone hates his business style, about which few helpful specifics are given, but which is luridly described in terms of raiding and conquering. He doesn’t play by the gentlemanly rules of business, he plays to win! No matter what! When he acquires a company, he unfairly beats his competitors by offering to buy it at a higher price, and then offering to buy it at a lower price when no one else can match his first price. And this works, somehow. What’s worse, is that he takes advantage of respectable companies and acquires them against the will of their aristocratic old-money owners.

I suspect Ms McNaught doesn’t understand how business works, because in a corporate takeover, the former owners, or “losers”, tend to go home with lots of money and leisure time, while the winners get a lot more work for the chance of possibly making more money down the road. Anyway, these respectable gentlemen hate it when Cole does this to them or their friends, and the business world looks askance at him. Cole doesn’t care, because that’s feelings, which have no place in his ruggedly handsome world. He even secretly revels in it, because he hates all these blue blood types, dating back to when he worked in a stable, and their daughters treated him like a piece of meat, and one of them fired him for sleeping with his wife. Aristocratic jerk, snubbing a hard-working young man with a poor background but great ambitions! If only Mr. Hayward had treated Cole fairly!

Me, if I was suspected of having sex with a wealthy Texas rancher’s wife, minor daughter or underage guests, I would be praising his restraint to the skies if I made it off the property without bullet holes. But I suppose that laid-back personality is why I am not a ruggedly handsome corporate raider.

Anyway, while Cole might seem to be on top of the world, financially at least, it turns out that he has an eccentric and crotchety old great-uncle, who is a silent 50% partner in Cole’s billion dollar enterprise. And as he dwindles in his twilight years, he has become obsessed with a legacy and wants Cole to have heirs of his own. So he gives Cole a deadline – get married in a few months or he’ll put his half of the company into a trust for another nephew who might be stupid, but is loyal and has kids.

Diana and Cole encounter one another when Cole’s PR henchwoman makes him go to a charity auction thing. He gets the lowdown on Diana’s recent romantic shortcomings, and feels bad, because she was the nicest juvenile rich person he knew back when he was a lusty stablehand, trying to refrain from hitting on her. Now he feels solidarity with her as he overhears the same rich people who look down on him gossiping about her. Meanwhile, Diana is feeling depressed and stupid because she never got breast implants, and doesn’t wear short skirts and tries to impress men with her brains instead of improving her looks. I am merely paraphrasing those sentiments, NOT extrapolating them. She really does contemplate those exact notions. But she’s happy to see Cole when they meet. Almost immediately, he offers to kiss her for the benefit of the lurking photographer so it will look like she’s over her ex-fiancé. Well, Diana didn’t become the founder of a home economics empire by just going along with random propositions from people she has not seen in 15 years…oh, wait. I guess she does. So that happens.

Then, during the auction party-thing, Cole makes a number of public gestures that bolster Diana’s social standing, because if a super-rich guy whom everyone hates is nice to her, then maybe she isn’t as repulsive as getting dumped by her fiancé made her appear at first? Society doesn't follow the rules of logic, because that seems to be how it works. So Diana’s understandably grateful, even though it’s plain she’s cracking under the strain of public humiliation and spending the last decade or so singlehandedly doing all the grownup stuff to provide for a family that includes five other healthy and mentally competent adults over the age of 30. That crack-up diagnosis is verbalized by her grandmother, and is followed up by exactly zero efforts from the rest of the family to alleviate it.

After the party, Cole suggests they go to Vegas to get married, in name only, because that will fix Diana’s image problem by making her look less pathetic and restore her reputation as the queen of domesticity, and it will get his uncle off his ass and get him back complete ownership in his company. Best of all, as Cole puts it, “Our marriage won’t be complicated by messy emotions!”

And Diana, being a combination of desperate, grateful, and a little hammered decides, what the hell, why not?

The next chapter starts with a surreal description of a violent sexual experience, that in Diana’s stream of consciousness she likens to being raped by a demon, explicitly comparing it to the similar scene in Rosemary’s Baby. Then she wakes up naked & hungover in a hotel room. They actually did get married. She decides that’s cool, and the reasons Cole gave her last night make sense. She meets Cole for breakfast, where he tells her all about how she got plastered and called the society columnists and Larry King to tell them about her wedding. When she asks if there was anything else, Cole decides not to mention anything else that happened on the plane, when he “lost a little of (his control) at thirty-two thousand feet.” In other words, I guess he raped her.

Okay, time out. I am not a feminist. I am not a misogynist either, but for the purposes of feminism and gender-studies and all that bullshit, I’m a misogynist. A feminist would characterize me as a Neanderthal who would chain women in the kitchen, with only pauses to pop out babies. But even by the standards of a brute like me, this is still some fucked up shit. Even if, in Cole’s place, you thought the emotionally vulnerable, stressed-out woman, who’s doing a favor worth billions of dollars to you, at some risk to her reputation, and whom you got deliberately got drunk to induce her cooperation, genuinely wanted the sex you gave her, you could at least have the decency to own up to it the next morning, instead of pretending it never happened, and letting her think she’s having weird nightmares, or leave her wondering about the cause of any physiological consequences.

But it’s off to introduce Cole to the new in-laws, where, even without knowing about the incident at 32,000 feet, they are properly appalled at what Diana is doing, but begin to accept it, once she has explained the business ramifications to their simple creative-type mminds, and hand-waved their objections that they are perfectly capable of earning their own livings without her having to marry an evil corporate raider. Diana points out that she’s the brains of the outfit and they can damn well trust the woman who’s made them all rich and famous, and if she wants to be fake-married, they can shut the hell up about it. Though she says it in a nice, classy and loving way, because that’s how Diana rolls.

Cole is accepted into the family, by everyone except Spencer, her sister Corey’s husband. Spence insists there has to be something wrong with Cole, because his best friend, the son of the Mr Hayward who fired Cole from his stables, absolutely hates his guts. But Corey watches Diana showing Cole around the workshops and gardens and sees them interacting, and all but breaks into a rendition of “There’s Something There that Wasn’t There Before” from Beauty and the Beast, and she’s on Team Cole now. Even though the new couple claims they’re getting a divorce as soon as his uncle kicks off.

Later, when they’re alone, Diana mentions her weird dream, which is actually a memory of when Cole RAPED HER a few chapters ago, and she innocently verbalizes it as a demonic nightmare. Cole makes a comment about his ego being hurt as she leaves. That causes Diana to realize that it wasn’t a dream, that her teenaged crush and current fake husband RAPED HER. So she breaks down and cries for a bit, but not why you’d think. In addition to remembering her ex-fiancé’s habit of backhanded compliments that were actually passive-aggressive put-downs, and all the occasions she wasted time on him when she could have been working, and self-recriminations for her current arrangement, she is angry with herself because...she hurt Cole’s feelings and insulted his sexual prowess with her comment about thinking her RAPE was a nightmare!

She goes out to apologize to him for being such a bitch after he has been nothing but kind and nice to her, and promises that she will be the best ever fake wife, from here on out. Cole, whatever his moral shortcomings, apparently does have as good an eye for an opportunity as the author claims, so he suggests they eventually incorporate sex into their fake marriage. Diana is tentatively open to the idea. Now we’re cooking with gas!

After several more cutesy scenes to indicate to the medium-stupid readers that Cole and Diana are meant to be, and secretly love each other (the totally stupid readers will just have to be surprised at the ending; Judith spent 30 seconds researching corporate takeovers for this book, she’s damn well not going to do EVERYTHING for you! ), they head off to meet the uncle who imposed marriage on Cole. They sell the marriage to the uncle, and Diana finds out about Cole’s tragic childhood, where his abusive father drove his mother to drink and then die, and his brothers strung up his beloved pet dog in the barn. Why this inspired him to be a corporate raider or justifies that time when he RAPED HER, I don’t know. But it’s sad and tragic and bonds him and Diana. So they consummate their marriage (in a consensual fashion this time) on his uncle’s front porch. She’s ashamed of her small breasts, but he thinks they’re hot, isn’t he awesome?

Then they go off and do business stuff, separately, but Cole is now under investigation for acquiring a company. To get advice, Diana goes to talk to her rich friend, Mr Hayward, whose son is a Senator, and who was Cole’s employer when he was a stablehand. The same Haywards who have her brother-in-law convinced Cole is evil.

Mr. Hayward tells her to get clear, because Cole is scum and they’re going to take him down. According to Mr. Hayward, Cole had sex with his sixteen year old daughter, got her pregnant, and complications from the subsequent abortion rendered her sterile, deprived him of grandchildren, and now his daughter is frequently institutionalized from the resultant trauma. The worst part, according to Mr Hayward, is that lack of grandchildren. Apparently, he didn't mind the statutory rape so much as the lack of grandchildren. Apparently his sister's sterility has kept the son from providing any grandchildren either. Apparently this is Cole's fault, because after he was driven from their lives, the decision to have the abortion that turned out to have a surprise bonus lifetime guarantee, is entirely Cole's doing.

Diana bails on the Hayward neighborhood of crazytown, and her sister finds her sitting in a catatonic stupor. But she's not horrified at her husband's past crimes (to be expected since his present crimes made little to no impression on her, despite being the victim), because she knows the Haywards' story to be untrue, because, back when they were kids, the girls all pooled their money and whoever managed to get to first base with Cole was to get the pot. Diana didn’t buy in, she pretended she wasn’t into Cole, and so she held the stakes for her friends. Since the Hayward girl, Barbara, never bothered to collect the pot, Diana KNOWS she could never have slept with Cole.

For rich teenaged girls, a bet among friends would obviously take greater precedence over the trauma of being the victim of statutory rape, parental discovery, and the complications of a botched abortion. There is NO WAY, with all that going on in her life, Miss Hayward would have neglected to tell Diana about her sexual conquest and passed up on that $60! So her our hero is obviously innocent. What a relief.

But it’s short-lived because the family hears on the news that Diana is filing for divorce from Cole, who’s under investigation by Congress and the SEC and whatnot. When reporters call for a comment, Diana says she has no idea what they are talking about, but deep inside, she knows Cole is trying to protect her from the blowback. So she hops a plane to go be with her husband, and Spencer, her brother-in-law, gives her some dirt on Senator Hayward, that will end his political career if he persists in persecuting Cole. More than a decade of close friendship with Spencer means nothing; if you are going to jeopardize the financial success of his sister-in-law's sham husband, because you believe he raped your sister, Spencer WILL expose your dirty little secrets!

Fortunately, our heroes never need resort to blackmail, because Diana convinces Barbara, Cole’s supposed victim, now in a mental institution, to come clean. Barbara confronts her father, brother and mother with the actual truth, which is that her mom was the one sleeping with Cole, and when she heard her husband finding her underwear in the stables, ran to her daughter’s room and convinced her to swap shirts and take the fall. Barbara went along, and became understandably messed up as a result. Her traumatic pregnancy, abortion and breakdown were the result of her mother’s example turning her into a run of the mill slut who got knocked up at a concert. The family has been blaming Cole for statutory rape for over a decade, which is why they abused the son’s senatorial influence to initiate an investigation of Cole’s corporate raiding. Instead of having him put in jail for STATUTORY RAPE! Apparently that’s only a firing offense in Texas, rather than a felony (Sadly, Transformers 4 seems to support this detail). It’s a good thing Cole became rich and successful enough that they could sic the SEC on him, otherwise, how would they have EVER obtained justice for a 23 year old impregnating a sixteen year old?

Anyway, Barbara's brother makes a peace overture and invites Diana & Cole out for dinner. At her urging Cole accepts, but tells her he's going to let the Senator pick up the check. Diana's old friend is perfectly amenable to reason, once he learns that Cole DIDN'T statutorily rape his sister, but DID have an affair with his mother. See? Cole's not a bad guy AT ALL!

Once Cole demonstrates that the employees of the company he acquired have invented a flat screen TV that can fit in a pizza box (this is the 90s, that would have been a big deal) and a battery that can run such a TV for five days (still waiting, Judith. What happened to your business sources? ), it is somehow proof that his acquisition of the company was legitimate, so he’s all vindicated. There is an epilogue, where Diana has a baby, and Cole is all happily married to her, having learned to appreciate things in life beyond corporate raiding, thanks to her talking her friends out of their insane vendetta against him. He now knows that there is more in this world than just being rich and making billion dollar acquisitions. Except the first words to his new baby son are “That’s the city of Dallas, Connor. Daddy’s going to give it to you.” Oh, Cole. So close. Anyway, Diana seems to think she’s a lucky girl, and that’s what matters. We’re going to ignore how the love of her life kicked off their romance by RAPING HER.

A troubling issue with this book, beyond the, you know, PLOT, is that the three most positively portrayed female characters, Diana, her sister & her mother, respectively, are the beneficiaries of some rather troubling relationship choices. Diana's mother (step-mother, technically), a single mom, married in a whirlwind courtship, before ever meeting her husband's daughter, who came home from boarding school to meet her new mom & sister. But it all worked out, and they lived happily until he died of a heart attack from her father helping him circumvent her efforts to feed them healthy food. At which point her step-daughter took over the family, and founded a multi-million dollar business empire that made her and her parents and her daughter household celebrities, while the step-daughter did all the work and took the brunt of resentment from sexists and envious women. Talk about winning the marriage lottery!

For other things that turned out better than common sense would lead one to think, Diana and Corey both, at 14 & 13, develop crushes on college-aged young men, and end up happily married to those crushes down the road. The way Corey & Spencer's relationship is discussed, I am morally certain they are the subjects of another book. I will not be attempting to read or even locate it. And of course, Diana gets drunk and boards a private plane with a stranger, gets about as violated as one could expect from such an event, and ends up living happily ever after with him.

There are no consequences of wildly risky decisions for the ladies of the Foster Family! I am beginning to see how some people blame romance novels for creating unrealistic relationship expectations.

Oh, and the hell with all of Robert Jordan’s critics. I am intimately familiar with the content of the Wheel of Time books, and I say that people who complain about excessive dress descriptions, haven't seen anything. Crepe is apparently a thing dresses and/or suits are made out of. Diana wears it a lot. I suspect it is not a skinny pancake, but Googling it is more than this book deserves. At least Jordan was writing in a world where French was not a thing, so characters were not describing each other’s appearance using words like crepe and peignoir and chignon (I’ve actually seen chignon a lot before reading this book, but somehow, not knowing what it is has not yet prevented me from enjoying a book with the word in it, so I’ve been letting it slide for the last couple decades).

Also, Jordan’s characters don’t spend just about every chapter in the first half of a book telling each other things that everyone in the conversation already knows, like explaining to one’s family & coworkers, the history of the family business they all founded together, or exchanging detailed anecdotes about shared experiences with the people who shared them, or explaining rudimentary business practices to successful businessmen with international reputations. Diana does all of that.

Also, also, while Judith McNaught apparently looked up some business terms, she seems to have completely missed the boat on how 20th century families function. Most of her CV appears to be novels with historical settings, with aristocrats instead of business people. In those settings, when a father dies, the oldest child might inherit his holdings and assets and assume responsibility for the provision and protection of the rest of the family members. But for a 22 year old in modern times, when her family members are her mother, grandparents and 21 year old sister, there really isn’t, or shouldn’t be any such obligation. Certainly no responsibility that compels such a young woman to spend most of the next decade mercilessly driving herself so hard she ruins her personal life, gets right to the edge of a nervous breakdown, and becomes so fixated on her responsibilities for the family success that she agrees to a non-sexual marriage to a man who will RAPE HER mere hours into the arrangement.

Women like this shit? Here I was wondering how a gender as stupid and easily manipulated as my own has managed to supposedly keep them in subjugation for all of recorded history. I don’t anymore. My mother doesn’t read this crap, I might add. She is way more into the domestic scene than Diana, had seven kids, and when they got old enough, went back to work and has performed extraordinarily at both of her subsequent careers. She holds in profound contempt any woman who would put a career ahead of kids, or who routinely read this sort of novel, and once ripped into a priest at my high school for suggesting that the Catholic Church oppresses women. Shortly after, he quit in the middle of the school year to rethink his vocation.

Needless to say, I grew up with some expectations of female dignity and self-respect, which did not really jibe with the state of the world. That Judith McNaught is one of a myriad of successful writers in her genre, and has produced a lot of novels akin to this one, that are aimed, rather accurately apparently, at women, gives me a better picture of the other side of the coin.

Happy Mother’s day, Mom. I really lucked out, apparently.

EDIT: I don’t care how many books you just read about people who knew Hitler, Tom. You don’t know jack about “psychologically unhealthy” reading material.