Erin Somers

Having moved to a house outside of the city and had a second child, Cora adjusts to her new life and meets Sam in a parent-baby group. They start up a sort of flirtation, but decide to be friends instead and they and their families spend a lot of time together. Cora begins a fantasy of an affair with Sam that exists side by side with her actual life over the years as their children grow, their jobs change or stay the same, and through changes with their respective spouses.

This a novel about show more the lives almost lived, about the paths that aren't chosen, or are chosen later; the changes chosen willingly and forced changes. Cora keeps a second life going in her mind that sometimes diverges dramatically from her actual life, and sometimes is nearly identical. It's an interesting concept and who hasn't thought about what might have happened if you'd accepted that job posting in another country or turned down the date with the person who later becomes your spouse? My criticisms of the story have mostly to do with being tired of a certain kind of character -- the one that graduates from Columbia (or another Ivy) and follows a predictable path from there, but that's more a complaint about the narrow scope of the people hired into the publishing world and not the fault of the author. show less

I'm just as ambivalent about this novel as the narrator Cora is about a possible affair! Does giving in to a strong mutual attraction for someone outside your marriage usually end well or disastrously? Do these attractions occur because hormones or boredom, or both? Cora and Sam meet at a baby playgroup with their kids and bond over the annoying ways of the group facilitator, who forces her child to urinate in a potty publicly. Cora's husband Eliot is chronically depressed and sexually show more inattentive. Sam's wife Jude is a high powered lawyer who is disgusted with her unambitious stay-at-home husband. Sam declaims that their relationship must stay platonic, so Cora imagines a parallel life with him where they meet at corporate hotels and even have a child together. Real life has its ups and downs, with careers, spouses, and children, and the author has a way with japes and bon mots that are truly hilarious and those bring energy to what would have been a typical middle class dilemma. Somers lives in Beacon, NY, a Hudson River suburb that became a refuge from NYC during covid, and the town itself and its denizens are welcome characters in the story. While there's a moral chant of "Can't you just keep it in your pants?" underlying my view, it could also be that I'm forty years older than the characters. Overall, an enjoyable read, with many quotable lines.

Quotes: "Certain jobs contributed nothing to your sense of self, but losing them shattered you anyway."

"It felt like coming down from Everest and checking your bank balance."

"Happiness is for children. Adults are after something else. They're after something interesting. Interesting is better than happy."

"You could not sustain the same level of heat over so many years. Occasionally, she was hit with a surge of desire for him, but she had become used to not acting on it." show less

"It was difficult, but one had to try and imagine an inner life for one's husband."

The Ten-Year Affair is in fact the story of a ten-year long mutual crush, between Cora and Sam. They are both married - in fact, they meet at a parent-baby group and initially bond over the weirdness of some of the other parents. Early on they kiss (chastely) and Sam jokes that maybe they will have a ten-year affair, but he and his wife Jude become friends with Cora and Eliot, which stops things from show more developing beyond the occasional meaningful moment. We see the crush through Cora's eyes, as she imagines their passionate relationship - finding in it everything that is lacking in her real life, as a mother of two small children with a depressed and passive husband, in a house which needs more work than they can afford. Really this is a story about the difference between fantasy and reality.

I didn't know, based on the synopsis, whether this was a story I was going to enjoy - I don't always like novels which are too much about our contemporary existence (the ten years of the story include the COVID pandemic). But actually I really enjoyed it. I think some of this may have been down to the reader of the audiobook, who did a great job pointing up the wit and humour of the book and did not make the characters feel too grating or self-obsessed. show less

This novel has an odor of flop sweat unique to the worlds of teevee and standup comedy, but it sure ain't no laughing matter. June, an assistant writer on a dying late night talk show, is whisked away to the home of Hugo Best, the over-the-hill talk show host, for a creepy weekend in Connecticut after his last show. It's a nightmare for them both - he's drowning in self-pity in his suburban dream palace and she's trying to figure out what she can get out of him to help her out of her now show more jobless state. The problem is that she hates doing stand-up, and that's basically all she can do, being too old to go back to her shit job as a page at Best's network. Both characters are completely unappealing, and I wasn't even interested enough to figure out who Hugo Best is IRL. Leave this one on the shelf. show less