Infidelity: A Love Story - Softcover

Pearlman, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0767908112 ISBN 13: 9780767908115

Publisher: Broadway, 2001

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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 the Author

Ann Pearlman grew up in Chicago and Pittsburgh the privileged daughter of the Jewish radical intellectual class. As a young woman, she went on archeological digs, worked with prostitutes in London, hung out with exiles from communist Europe in Paris. In the mid sixties, she married a black professional football player and artist and became the mother of adopted and natural biracial children.

She obtained her MSW degree from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1966 and worked in school systems, protective service, womens prison, child guidance clinic and helped run a poverty program for the city of Cincinnati before starting her private practice in Ann Arbor in 1977. In 1986, her peers in Michigan voted her Social Worker of the Year. Under her married name Ann Pearlman Hinton, she co-authored Getting Free: Women and Psychotherapy, (Grove Press, 1982) which has been used both as a consciousness raising touchstone for the feminist community and as a college text book.

Her book, Keep the Home Fires Burning: How to Have an Affair with Your Spouse, was published by Simon and Schuster in 1985. Following her authors tour, which included stops on Oprah, Donahue, Sally Jessie Raphael, she was asked to return by both Oprah and Sally.

As her marriage of thirty years desolved, Ann began writing a memoir that, over the next four years, became Infidelity: A Memoir. The book is a beautifully-written and frank account of her experiences and the legacy of adultery throughout her life.

Anns short stories have won literary prizes. She has studied fiction writing with Nicholas Delbanco at the University of Michigan, has attended workshops at Sewanee where she worked with John Casey and Ellen Douglas, and Squaw Valley where she worked with Al Young. Anns metal sculptures are shown in several galleries. She also writes a monthly column called Millennium Families for Ann Arbor Parent.

Ann continues her private practice as a psychotherapist and marriage and family therapist. She lives in an oak and aspen forest with her teenage daughter.

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0767908112
• ISBN 13: 9780767908115
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272