Seven notable books about marital affairs

Katherine Ashenburg is the prize-winning author of two novels, four non-fiction books and hundreds of articles on subjects that range from travel to mourning customs to architecture. She describes herself as a lapsed Dickensian and as someone who has had a different career every decade. Her work life began with a Ph.D. dissertation about Dickens and Christmas, but she quickly left the academic world for successive careers at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer; at the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail as the arts and books editor; and most recently as a full-time writer.

Ashenburg's new novel is Her Turn. In it, Liz, a divorced newspaper editor, finds her tidy life overturned when the woman now married to Liz’s ex-husband submits a personal essay to the column Liz edits. Wife #2 has no idea that she is sending her essay to Wife #1, and Liz decides to keep that a secret, with surprising results. Elizabeth Renzetti writes of it, “It is infused with the joyful spirit of Nora Ephron and lit with a charm all its own.”

At Lit Hub Ashenburg tagged seven favorite thought-provoking infidelity narratives, including:

Margaret Drabble, The Waterfall

You have to give Drabble full marks for originality. Not too many passionate love affairs start in the bed where the woman has given birth just days before. And not too many affairs continue in the almost constant company of a newborn and her three-year-old brother. Jane Grey’s husband has left shortly before her home birth in 1960s London, so her cousin and best friend Lucy and her husband James take turns staying with Jane in the first days and nights after the birth. Things in her hot bedroom are intensely fleshly, with blood on the sheets, leaking breasts, and a hungry infant in a cot at the side of the bed. Still, it’s a surprise when, without any preamble, the taciturn but fetching James announces that he must be in that bed with Jane.

So it begins, the sexual awakening of Jane and her betrayal of Lucy. Although massively introspective, Jane does not disturb her erotic haze by discussing Lucy with James. On an outing with him and, as usual, the children, she thinks, “This is the peace of treachery: this calm, the lovely calm of infidelity.” Warning: the lovely calm is temporary.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue