I feel like the integrity of memoir as a genre has cropped up a bit lately. I mentioned it in my review of Unquiet (Ullmann classes her book as a blend of fiction and memoir) but before that, I was discussing it with a friend who saw Leslie Jamison speak about her memoir, Splinters, which focuses on the break-up of her marriage. I haven’t read Splinters yet, but my friend said that Jamison emphasised the importance of not casting her ex wholly as the bad guy, that in memoir you had to show the ‘good bits’ as well, or risk losing the trust of your readers.
I had that in mind as I began journalist Kate Legge’s memoir, Infidelity and Other Affairs. It’s also about her marriage, which eventually ended after her husband had an affair. In terms of my curiosity about portraying the ‘bad guys’ in memoir, I was rewarded early in the book:
When he read an early draft of this story, he got up from the table and left the house to go for a walk. Too judgemental, was his response. He was right. He has strong views that buttress his behaviour and tame the guilt, and he’s crafted a narrative to protect his character. I admire his unflinching tolerance of my blowtorch.
But props to Legge – for letting him read a first draft, and for (perhaps) responding to his feedback.
The first half of the book explores infidelity, both how it impacted her own marriage but also how infidelity could be traced through generations of her husband’s family. The implication is ‘do we inherit unfaithfulness’? It’s an interesting idea, and Legge explores it from various angles, including drawing on material from infidelity gurus, Esther Perel and Dan Savage (although she notes that she didn’t consult either of these specialists when ‘…infidelity mowed me down in the hallway of my home’).
She begins with exploring the tyrannical nature of lust –
Nothing is sacred or beyond the pale once the wick is lit.
And moves on to the waves of emotion that hit her in the months that followed discovering her husband’s affair.
Recovery from the blow of deceit often begins with the razor blade of revenge.
Legge didn’t take revenge – despite the betrayal, she still loved her husband. They tried to salvage their marriage.
Distrust is a hard burden to shift and a burdensome guilt to shoulder.
In the second part of the book, Legge continues the theme of inheritance, and looks at mental health more broadly, focusing on her own brother, mother and an uncle. The last part of the book is made up of a handful of essays, topics ranging from owning cats and social media, to smoking pot and hiking.
Legge’s writing is excellent – engaging and clear-sighted – but I sincerely wish it had been published as a short volume on infidelity. The essays at the end felt like filler – that’s not to say they weren’t interesting, but they were completely out-of-sync with the first half of the book. The flame fizzled out.
A last word on memory –
Memory is an unreliable magnifier. The bizarre and the unsettling sear themselves into our early consciousness. The splintered gate post. The shattered vase. The slap. The argument. The drunken tirade. The lipstick-smeared face. We are less likely to dwell on the benign lulls in between.
3/5
On her brother, Legge writes –
Mum died when he was twenty. Their relationship was caustic but her departure halved his defence team. Dad shouldered him for another forty years but his shock absorbers wore thin… in the last years of Dad’s life, their interactions whittled down to a weekly thirty minutes, or for as long as it took them to devour Dad’s Saturday lunch plate of smoked salmon and salad. Dad was a creature of habit but he’d also given up trying to please his son.
As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (June 6): Belfast 7°-14° and Melbourne 9°-17°.
I remember that there was a lot of talk about this very issue when the book first came out.
I admit, I’m uneasy about it, and I never wanted to read the book. No matter who they are or what they’ve done, I’m not a fan of tell-all memoirs when the people involved are still around to be impacted by it. (Especially the children who are often collateral damage).
Even if there are some concessions that show the ‘good bits’. (After all, common sense tells us that if there weren’t any good bits, they wouldn’t have got married in the first place.)
Some things are, IMO, best kept private, and as the years go by, it feels better to have ‘behaved well’ than to let anger get the better of you. What feels like righteous anger at the time, can fade into simply not caring about it any more. And then when you look back on it, you don’t feel guilty about your own behaviour.
But I think it’s a generational thing. The tell-everything, put-it-out-there-on-social-media generation have no secrets and no private life!
In fairness to Legge, she kept her anger out of it and instead kept the focus on how infidelity impacted the family through generations. However, that included her own son who, shortly into his own partnership, had an affair after the birth of their first child. Of all the bits that made me uncomfortable, this was it – I don’t think this was her story to tell.
Ouch, nor do I.
But also, don’t you think the entire book, no matter how calmly told, is an expression of anger. And revenge too. Those men have been very publicly outed (I heard about it on the ABC, the national broadcaster) and surely that will impact on their future relationships?
I think it would be hard to not express anger – does it have to be published? Maybe not, but also why not?
The question of future relationships is an interesting one. I would argue that infidelity impacts future relationships, regardless of whether it is written about or not. (I’ll make a distinction here between a drunken one-night-stand and an ongoing affair, where the person has countless opportunities to be honest). Most people I know, when getting into a new relationship, ask whether the other person has ever cheated. It is a deal-breaker for many (all the old sayings – once a cheater, always a cheater; marry the mistress, create a vacancy – are sadly very often true). If the person who has previously been unfaithful reveals that, then everyone is going into the relationship eyes wide open. If they chose not to reveal that, the relationship begins with a lie (and my sense is the old sayings will play out).
If a person has been unfaithful in the past, and wants healthy future relationships, they have to do the work to understand their history. And if they can’t talk about that work, and the ways they’ve changed, with a new partner, then there will no doubt be problems.
Yes, I see what you mean…
See, I prefer a novel or poetry to explore these kind of things rather than memoir. The most moving book about infidelity and divorce that I ever read was Sharon Olds’ collection of poems Stag’s Leap.
I have a copy of Stag’s Leap in my TBR stack! 🙂
It was my constant companion during the 3-4 very tense years of me getting a divorce.
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