Infidelity: A love story - Hardcover

Pearlman, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0340819340 ISBN 13: 9780340819340

Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks, 2001

Synopsis

Infidelity is the story of one family and three marriages. It is also a story that resonates in many American marriages. In seamless prose and a mesmerizing voice, rich scenes move characters across the span of the twentieth century and three continents.

Pearlman mines a universal vein in her bluntly honest memoir of infidelity, which tells the tale of the effects of marital infidelity across three generations of American women: her grandmother, her mother, and herself.

As the women coped with the intensity the father and grandfathers adulteries added, Ann learned of the wisdom, pain, and female strength the mens behavior provoked.

As the 1960s rolled in with the sexual political revolution, Ann lived "la dolce vita" in Europe. Following the construction of the Berlin Wall, she returned to the US to complete her studies. She fell in love with Tyrone, an African-American professional football player and artist, and together they took part in the civil rights movement. They helped each other obtain graduate degrees and forged dual careers, raising adopted and biological children. Tyrone became a University professor teaching painting and Ann became a psychotherapist and marriage and family counselor. She wrote a book on the joys of sexual monogamy and embarked on an authors tour appearing on TV talk shows (Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael) as an expert on marriage.

Then, as the twentieth century was drawing to a close, their ten-year-old daughter discovered her fathers affair with a married Japanese woman from a distinguished family. Once again, Ann was forced to revisit infidelity, an echo from the previous generation.

Infidelity: a Memoir is the book every married man and woman should. Ann Pearlman is on her way to becoming a major literary voice.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

It is estimated that an alarming four out of five married couples experience infidelity. Growing up with a mother and grandmother who painfully accepted the existence of their respective husbands? mistresses, Ann Pearlman set out to beat the odds. She embarked on a career as a therapist who helped hundreds of unhappily married patients build new lives. She also found a husband with whom she felt secure. But after thirty years of rewarding marriage and parenthood, she discovered that her husband was having an affair with one of his art students. Infidelity is the moving account of her shattered trust, and the women in her family who endured similar wounds in the radically different climate of America before 1960.

Written in precisely drawn, vivid scenes, Infidelity traces Pearlman?s first understanding of unfaithfulness through her father. A gifted and intelligent man, he took the time to explain Freud?s theories to her during dinner, a meal often served late because of his after-work trysts. Falling in love with Ty, an African American football player and artist, she basked in a strong marriage that even shrugged off interracial bias and inspired her to write a book on how to foster vitality in a marriage. Yet as her own unraveled, she arrived at a turning point that would test everything she had taught and believed. Compelling reading for men and women alike, Infidelity is an eye-opening testament to commitments made and broken, and the experience of matrimony across three very different yet strikingly connected lifetimes.

From the Back Cover

"An unusually vivid and striking account of the effects of men’s affairs on their wives and daughters...an immediate, personal story of depth and power, as gripping as a good novel."
--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Ann Pearlman’s honesty digs into the reader’s memory bank and makes it acceptable to have those memories we thought were too horrible to share. She has handled infidelity with a sense of humor and a delicacy that could break the heart."
--Oakland Press

"She has a sharp eye for detail and is adept at expanding her discussion of infidelity’s pain and relationship-mutating qualities."
--Kirkus Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0340819340
• ISBN 13: 9780340819340
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 248