Adultery

Is talking about sex a kind of foreplay? Is reading Madame Bovary the first step on the road to ruin? In this playful analysis of the writerly life, Louise DeSalvo explores the relationship between reading about adultery, committing adultery--and writing about adultery. Sound simplistic? The formula worked for authors as diverse as Edith Wharton, Sylvia Plath, and even Robert James Waller, whose mega-bestselling Bridges of Madison County is, after all, about an extramarital affair.

And it also worked for DeSalvo herself--although she is not an adulterer, but an "adultery survivor" who must come to terms with her fantasies about adultery in order to heal her marriage. Her husband was a young medical resident when he had the affair that changed her life; DeSalvo was surprised to find that he did not want to leave her and their infant son but hoped instead to keep the family together. Before DeSalvo could let herself be fully present again in the marriage, however, she had to put the ghosts to rest. It's hardly surprising that, as a creative-writing professor (and the author of Writing as a Way of Healing), she does so by taking pen in hand to reconstruct the affair in her imagination, using writers like Colette, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Alfred Kinsey as her guides and revealing something frequently overlooked in our contemporary model of infidelity: adultery is often a folie trois, not merely deux. --Patrizia DiLucchio Louise DeSalvo risks all, in the company of Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, and Madam Recamier. By filtering the story of her own husband's affair through other's stories, she revels in the always exciting fantasy and tells from the usually painful reality of adultery. The conclusions she draws, and the balance she finds in her marriage and in others, make ADULTERY a fun, poignant, and compassionate book.