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Publishers Weekly
The Other Woman may be a topic of eternally prurient interest, but the main attraction of this strong collection of 21 personal essays is the top-drawer writers such as Diana Abu-Jaber, Laurie Stone and Susan Cheever. Narrated from the point of view of the marriage wrecker or that of the wife who suffers the anguish of triangulation in a trusting relationship, these tales drip with the bitterness of experience. In "Palm Springs," Mary Jo Eustace records the shattering moment when she was stranded on vacation with her small children, and her husband revealed he had fallen in love with his movie co-star. Jane Smiley's terrifically funny "Iowa Was Never Like This" describes the incorrigible but enchanting litany of love's fickle nature. Dani Shapiro's "The Mistress" recreates her several years' affair with the much older stepfather of her college friend—and the lies she finally uncovered by hiring a detective. And in her plainspoken "The Uterine Blues," Connie May Fowler wonders when women are going to smarten up and stop sabotaging one another by sleeping with each other's husbands. The anthology features tales from women of all ages, lesbians and women who have been abused physically: it is a candid and truly fascinating look at how men and women love and hurt.

O (Oprah) Mag., June issue
"Invite the bitch to dinner" is one wickedly brash survival strategy in The Other Woman. Among the star turns in this unusually frank and furious collection of essays are Pam Houston's "Not Istanbul," a hypothetical journey into an impossibly complicated relations ("Here's the thing about the other woman. She lives inside your head") and Connie May Fowler's "The Uterine Blues," a savory bit of rancor from a woman scorned.

The Toronto Star - July 8, 2007
They loved, lusted, lost; 21 women wives, lovers, others consider, in the rawest of voices, the perils of sex, deception, love and betrayal.

Powerful, poignant, wrenching and yet weirdly uplifting...a dazzling work of uncommon eloquence. It summarily overturns rigid black-and-white notions that all cheated wives are saints and all mistresses are sinners to illuminate a rainbow of variations. It also manages to ponder female relationships in a deeply sophisticated (as opposed to a feathery chick-lit) way. Even more impressive, every single one of these 21 true-life stories is pretty damn great. You can't say that every day about anthologies, which are inherently uneven. Credit editor (and contributor) Victoria Zackheim for holding her authors to a higher standard, coaxing them to come clean about their experiences from both sides of the divide in language that lands like a left hook to the chin.
If there is a common theme pervading these stories...it is palpable self-reflection. Clearly, each of these women has spent enormous time inside her own head and heart trying to make sense of her actions. Powerful, poignant, wrenching and yet weirdly uplifting, The Other Woman is an astonishing read that once again proves the old saw about truth being stranger than fiction. -Kim Hughes, Toronto writer and editor.

Associated Press - You’ll be seduced by ‘The Other Woman’- June 19, 2007
Whose fault is infidelity?

What is it about these women that lures away committed men? What is it like to be them, and what is it like on the hopeless other end, trying to silence their siren calls?

A series of essays collected in “The Other Woman,” edited by “The Bone Weaver” author Victoria Zackheim, explores the complex mysteries of the modern-day mistress from both female points of the triangle. (Nobody cares what the men are thinking because the assumption is they’re not.)

The authors reveal a rich collection of personal sagas, the kind that women tell each other over cosmos, after sobbing in private has passed and everybody is ready to have a good laugh and see things with clarity.

It might not be the thing you buy for a newly devastated friend.

San Francisco Chronicle - Thursday, June 28, 2007
'The Other Woman' - Well-known writers share range of experiences in anthology
Reyhan Harmanci

The other woman. The third party. The Jezebel. She's gotten a lot of press over the millennia but has rarely gotten to tell her own story. In "The Other Woman”...some of the contributors are unrepentant adulterers. Some have vivid tales of the damage the other woman has wrought. Zackheim has never been the other woman or been wronged by another woman, but hearing the phrase "the other woman"...got her thinking. In the collection, she emphasizes the range of experiences, rendered in styles that run the gamut from humorous to heartbreaking to just really mad.

Women will do anything for love. That much is clear in...revealing—and riveting— collection of female-authored essays in The Other Woman. What isn't as clear is the answer to the question: Why? And even more so—as we get to know the men beloved by these wives and lovers—why with this lot, none of whom comes across as the charismatic Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, but rather as cads, really, who lie as easily and as often to their lovers as to their wives....the power behind [this] collection is in the rich, multifaceted perspectives...piercingly analytical—none of these women hides her faults or humiliations... Written by top writers, these modern tales from the marriage crypt are grippingly paced and rich with social analysis and insight. Dianne Rinehart

The same delicious guilty pleasure a person experiences when a girlfriend confides a story from her life (only after extracting the promise: never tell) is what a reader has in store, opening Victoria Zackheim’s addictively readable collection of true life stories about The Other Woman. I picked it up thinking I’d read one or two, and two hours later, I was still turning pages. Poignant, chilling, occasionally heartbreaking, and all true. Joyce Maynard, author of The Usual Rules and Internal Combustion

With a generous hand and an artful eye, Victoria Zackheim beckons forth the Other Woman and invites her to unveil herself in this moving and exhilarating assortment of essays. Friend, co-worker, neighbor, even self, the Other Woman is almost always a surprise, but the biggest surprise of all is that this volume offers so many unexpected glimpses of her. Abby Frucht, author of Polly's Ghost

The essays in The Other Woman are a fascinating, moving and sometimes frightening window into a subject of which fascinates, moves and frightens us—infidelity. I read this book in a single sitting—I couldn't put it down. Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

Ask twenty-one wonderful women writers to let loose on The Other Woman and you wind up with a collection that reads more like a page-turning novel than a book of essays. When you catch your breath and remember these stories are all true, you're touched by the willingness of these authors to let you in on their secrets. Sometimes painful, other times funny, always wise—this is a wonderful book. M. J. Rose, international best-selling author of The Delilah Complex