There is a list of words a reviewer – I mean me – will never use. One is “brave”. I’m breaking this rule. There is no word more apt than brave for Kate Legge’s Infidelity and Other Affairs.
She’s straight-up from the opening paragraph: “Affairs are a little like childbirth. Someone is always having one somewhere, usually right under the nose of a spouse because nobody knows everything that happens inside a marriage, not even the people in it.”
The only word for Kate Legge is brave.Credit:Alan Weedon
“Yairs”, as Patrick White might say. There’s more than enough truth in that for an entire novel. But who gets to tell the damned truth? The whole truth and nothing else? (Which doesn’t exist, of course.)
Kate Legge has not turned her husband and his treachery into a novel, as Nora Ephron did, or Faye Weldon, but has summoned all her journalistic experience, interviewed her friends, family and psychological experts, taken a deep breath and plunged in. Legge has been a journalist since her university days when she was the first female editor of Melbourne University’s paper, Farrago.
The cover of Kate Legge’s new book: Infidelity and Other Affairs.
This book is an inquiry into aspects of infidelity: is it just that undistinguished thing, lust? Maybe it is genetic or, more likely, shabby modelling? Check out your prospective in-laws before committing? And why is it that older men, having medical enhancements that sustain what should naturally wither, return the most dramatic lift in the statistics for infidelity? Conservative estimates suggest that infidelity happens in 20-25 per cent of all marriages. Conservative.
Legge’s two admired guides through her perilous journey, Esther Perel and Dan Savage, tend to see marriage as a conflict zone and within this zone there are very few bystanders. And they are being non-judgmental as they try to find ways for the human animal to negotiate a path through the thorny wood that recognises differences as well as needs.
The reasons for an affair are individual but Legge lists some: “Drought in the marital bedroom, domestic accord, impulsiveness, insecure attachment, loneliness, neuroticism, narcissism, discontent, substance abuse, a desire for risk-taking, a quest for self-discovery, an escape from the monotony of monogamy.”
Yet, when Legge discovered that her own partner of many years had been conducting affairs for just as many years and that his latest was with her very close friend she was unable to seek help from any specialists, let alone Perel and Savage. In her desolation and rage all she could do was live moment-to-moment and talk, let the outrage, the unfairness, the pain issue from her mouth with those she trusted.
She was amazed at the common ground she shared. And sometimes, despite her intentions, she found herself talking about it to the high-profile people she was interviewing. Legge and her partner were a high-profile couple themselves. The one way she could stay sane, steady her course for her two sons as well as herself, was the discipline, the obsession of work.
And this word brave? Because Legge is proud, she needs to distinguish herself from every other fool who rushes into print. She writes that a wise literary friend discouraged exactly this, yet here she is, going into the awful detail – I read, at times, in horror – about how she behaved. But, being successful in a hard-boiled, very white, privileged male profession for many years, she has faith in rationality and logic. She forgave her partner, they tried to address why this had happened. She believed him.
She Believed Him could have been the title for this book. And perhaps she could have been more forensic in her remembering; her partner’s father had divorced his wife to cement a long-running affair. The book is dedicated to that former wife, Molly, the quite heavenly woman who has been the constant in Legge’s turbulent life.
The book is also a memoir, dense at times, of Legge’s family. Again she has a glittering openness about the griefs and disturbances, the mental precariousness of her clever mother who was so painfully a woman of her time, inhabiting the entitled patriarchal world of her emotionally unavailable husband. She also has, with her beloved older brother, the responsibility for a younger brother. She has two sons and is now a grandmother.
Kate Legge has such stamina that she has even found generosity to be friends, best friends, with her ex-partner despite the behaviour that was, it has to be said, emotional violence. Really? I wondered if she’s read any of Elena Ferrante’s minute dissections of patriarchy?
Infidelity and Other Affairs by Kate Legge is published by Thames & Hudson, $34.99.
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