My Wife's Affair - Hardcover

Woodruff, Nancy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0399156291 ISBN 13: 9780399156298

Publisher: Penguin Adult HC/TR, 2010

Synopsis

A smart, sexy novel about a woman's search for her former self on the London stage

Georgie and Peter, very much in love, move to London with their three children. Once there, Georgie's dormant acting career takes off and she wins the role of Dora Jordan in a one-woman show. Dora Jordan was the most famous comic actress of the eighteenth century (she had thirteen illegitimate children, including ten by the future king of England).

As Georgie rehearses for her part, she becomes increasingly drawn to Dora Jordan, who she sees as a working mother with struggles exactly like her own. And when Georgie can no longer fight her attraction to the playwright, she begins an affair with tragic results.

Narrated by Peter, a failed-writer-turned-businessman, My Wife's Affair is about infidelity, passion, duty, and about finally getting what you want and then wanting still more.

About this title

About the Author:

Nancy Woodruff received her MFA from Columbia University, where she won the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award. She taught writing at Columbia and SUNY Purchase before moving in 1997 to London, where she taught for eight years at Richmond, the American International University. She currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches at New York University.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Woodruff (Someone Else's Child) leaves not a dry eye in the house in this gripping ode to theater and the love it can command—and crush. Former actress turned restless suburban New Jersey mom-of-three Georgie and her journalist husband, Peter, transplant to London for Peter's new job. There, Georgie finds her way back to the theater and lands a role in a small one-woman production of Shakespeare's Woman, playing famous 18th-century British stage actress Dora Jordan. It's a part that consumes Georgie from the start, notes Peter, who achingly chronicles his wife's affair with her part and, eventually, with playwright Piers. Georgie's tour de force as Dora comes from her total recognition of the character—Two hundred years later and it's exactly the same thing, Georgie tells Piers—and her life as Dora and as Piers's lover begin to take precedence over her husband and children. Peter's excruciating autopsy of his crumbling marriage is unsparing and relentlessly punishing, but the kicker at the novel's end makes the adultery feel like a cozy little tea party. It's brutal and lovely. (Apr.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Adult HC/TR
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0399156291
• ISBN 13: 9780399156298
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288