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Nobody suspects the schoolteachers. You wouldn’t have either.
In 1985, Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre was cut from its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Thirty-two years later, valued at as much as $160 million, it was found behind a bedroom door in a quiet couple’s home. Every reporter circled the same disbelief: could two schoolteachers really have done it?
The headlines told you what was found. They could never tell you what was hidden.
IN OUR SECRET LIFE does not solve the case. It imagines the marriage behind it.
In 1955, Jerry and Rita meet in the Catskills: two pickpockets who know their own kind on sight. He sees theft as an art form, a lifted wallet and a de Kooning the same kind of freedom. She is the better thief, practiced at vanishing in plain sight. Recognition becomes a pact, and the pact becomes a marriage: fifty-seven years, two children, a hundred countries, and a life no teacher’s salary could ever explain.
Of everything they ever took, only one thing stayed: a woman in ochre, behind their bedroom door for more than thirty years.
Rita tells it herself, moving backward from her final days, as the illness taking her memory threatens the secret she guarded her whole life. The mind that hid everything is now trying to give it away, and the woman who spent a lifetime making the world look past her is fighting, at the end, only to remember.
A love story. An art heist. A secret worth $160 million.
Because behind every headline is a marriage. And behind every marriage, a secret.
Includes a reading group guide.
On sale October 27, 2026. See every place to buy.
A love story with the soul of The Notebook and the daring of The Thomas Crown Affair.
For Readers Of…
Real art crime: Michael Finkel’s The Art Thief and B.A. Shapiro’s The Art Forger
Love and memory: Lisa Genova’s Still Alice
Get a glimpse inside Rita’s world with an exclusive first chapter from IN OUR SECRET LIFE.
Rita is the voice at the heart of In Our Secret Life – wife, mother, schoolteacher, world traveler, thief, and the keeper of a secret that survived an entire lifetime.
In 1955, she and Jerry meet in the Catskills — two pickpockets who know their own kind on sight.
Recognition becomes a pact, and the pact a life — thefts that paid for what most dream of: a hundred countries, grand hotels, and masterpieces bought and sold beneath an ordinary American marriage.
The novel begins near the end of her life, as the illness stealing Rita’s memories threatens to reveal the one thing she and Jerry could never allow the world to know.
And from those fading memories, we travel backward…
To a summer in the Catskills.
To a young woman who could disappear in a crowd.
To the man who recognized exactly what she was.
To the beginning of an extraordinary fifty-seven-year love story built on secrets.
Watch Rita’s videos and follow her story @lifewithrita1955.
A TRUE STORY THAT CAPTIVATED THE WORLD.
The real-life art theft that inspired IN OUR SECRET LIFE has been covered by more than 100 media outlets around the globe.
