On the surface All That Shimmers is a heartfelt recount of journal entries kept by a women in an abusive and unfaithful relationship. But deep down author Jade Jaeger feels it is so much more.
Jade says her tell-all autobiography was a therapeutic experience, in which she writes about her relationship with Sydney millionaire and owner of the Pubboy brand, Mark Alexander-Erber.
At the time that their story of “extravagant love gone into liquidation” was unfolding it hit newspaper headlines, but Jade says she has stayed silent — until now.
This very honest and confronting book describes in detail the couple’s relationship and their seemingly perfect lifestyle filled with Fendi bags, Hermès bracelets and expensive cars.
Jade reveals that putting her story together was a three-year process, which included nine months in Bali, where she spent time going over the countless diary entries she kept while married to Mark.
“If I’m honest at the time I was very angry, very hurt and very disillusioned and this was a way of being able to write all of that down and get it out of myself,” she says.
And so the mother-of-two has written her story about how she met and fell in love with a man who owned one of the biggest brands in Sydney.
But when his eye started to wander, Jade had to decide whether she would stay in her luxurious lifestyle ignoring her husband’s infidelity or stand up for herself and what she believes in and start over again with nothing.
When asked about her book, rather than tell of the bitterness and bad experience she once lived with, she chooses to speak of the self realisations and lessons learned that came from putting her story to paper.
“The book in itself was therapy and it’s funny — the more you write, the clearer you become about yourself on the pages so you can see where you went wrong as well,” Jade says.
“There was a lot of finger pointing and blaming and at first all the entries were really bitter and then I could see myself really clearly through the pages. “As it processed through the divorce and all the different things that started to happen as an off shoot of that, it was very confronting and there were a lot of things about myself that I didn’t like.”
Despite the book’s moments of detailed harshness and confrontation, including her involvement with a group of suburban housewives who occasionally did cocaine, chapters about her husband’s affair and her being labelled his “estranged wife”, Jade says she has no regrets with writing the book the way she did.
“It’s exactly how I felt at the time, even when I ripped into people,” Jade says.
“It really was a journal and I’m allowed to write exactly how I felt at the time. And you know that’s the problem people censor things so much it makes them unrealistic.
“We all lose our temper and get angry and every thing and every conversation that took place in the book happened that way for me.”
Jade says she would love other woman to take away a message of self-reliance from her book, both financially and emotionally.
“Once you have that nailed, nothing can really touch you in this world. It’s also about not basing the idea of yourself on material things,” Jade says.
“You can do with very little. There are three things that you need to be happy: something to do, someone to love and something to look forward to.
“And mostly everyone has exactly that if you think hard about it — everyone has those things within them right now no matter what it is.”
All That Shimmers is published by Macmillian ($34.99).
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