Adultery - Softcover

Desalvo, Louise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807062251 ISBN 13: 9780807062258

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2000

Synopsis

Just after Louise DeSalvo gave birth to her first child, her husband confessed that he was having an affair. After surviving the crisis in her marriage, she began to read and write about adultery to explore the question of why people cheat. The result is this fun and compassionate book that draws upon the lives and works of literary figures such as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, and Henry Miller to offer a transforming understanding of infidelity and marriage.

About this title

Review:

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 à trois, not merely deux. --Patrizia DiLucchio

From the Publisher:

"Face it: No matter how faithful you are, you've thought about infidelity. But after reading Adultery, you'll never think about it the same way again. In this absorbing exploration of marriage and autonomy, Louise DeSalvo exposes the secret to a successful partnership: valuing it, and valuing yourself."—Leora Tanenbaum, author of Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation

"What does it matter if Louise DeSalvo is pious or promiscuous? She lays her hands on the reader. She seduces. I'm convinced—or is it healed?"—Mirabella

"DeSalvo's moving literary exploration is great preparation for her real work: resolving the betrayal in her own marriage."—Rebecca Miller, Library Journal

"Tart and entertaining."

—*Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0807062251
• ISBN 13: 9780807062258
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176