In recent years, the literary marriage novel has taken a backseat to the literary divorce novel, the novel of interpersonal discontent and cynicism, with forms like autofiction sometimes used as a means of gaining distance from or interrogating the project of heterosexual coupling. Meanwhile, contemporary romance—smutty, cozy, saccharine, highly lucrative for the moment—has saturated the market, causing a panic over the tastes of the masses and the state of writing about marriage. It’s been a long time since there’s been a novel in the genre worth talking about.
Thankfully and just in time, Erin Somers, journalist and author of the novel Stay Up With Hugo Best, has given us one of the best marriage novels of the decade. The Ten Year Affair follows the interior lives and fantasies of two Hudson Valley couples, each wrestling with the mundane but universal dissatisfactions that come with middle age, parenting, and financial uncertainty. Cora and her family have traded the city for small-town life. When she meets Sam at a baby group and bonds over their mutual bafflement at the other parents, the two conduct an increasingly consuming friendship, one that limns the boundary between platonic, romantic, and sexual. Not only is the novel keenly observed and brisk in its pacing, it’s consistently and outrageously hilarious.
I caught up with Somers over the phone at the end of a day of heavy press. We talked book covers, the state of publishing today, the original short story from which The Ten Year Affair was expanded, a past collaboration that means a lot to both me and Somers, and what it takes to write to be both funny and moving on the page.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I read the galley several months ago then handed it off to some friends. Needless to say, we all loved it. And breathing a sigh of relief that this book did not come out during the summer.
It was always going to be a fall book from the earliest conversations, and I think that the publisher always wanted to do a big swing with it as opposed to playing up the frothy, sex romp angle of it. I was very grateful because that happened with my first book, where there was an attempt to sell it as this commercial thing, and then readers of commercial fiction were like, What the fuck?
You're a journalist, and in that role you’ve done a lot of writing about the publishing world, which has been the subject of much interesting and revealing critique lately. Plus, your day job is at Publisher’s Lunch, which means you’re very aware of the business side of things. Does that awareness color your writing at all?
I do my best to silo off the creative work and keep all that insider stuff separate because I know all about it. I have to just not let it contaminate the creative side at all because I would get really scared all the time. I think it would paralyze me. I've detached the creative side from any thoughts of the market because I know that things are somewhat dire for literary fiction, and I don't know that I could do it at all. I think I would just be completely discouraged.
Do you feel your work reporting on publishing offers you a more practical perspective?
I think I have a handle on the way things work, and I wish that meant that I could keep my head about the creative work and not be so emotionally attached to it. Somehow, I still drive myself insane, just like anybody else who doesn't know how things work to a lesser degree. It has helped me at points, but I'm not always able to be cool.
Let's talk about the novel. Immediately, names like Updike and Cheever come up when talking about infidelity fiction of a certain kind, of a certain era. But my first thought ran to Laurie Colwin when I was reading this.
I love her. Love her.
She has such a wonderfully light touch while being so astute and sharp. I think the closest novel I've read from a more contemporary author is Katherine Heiny’s Standard Deviation. As you were going about this novel, did you feel like you were trying to be deliberately in conversation with certain people?
Laurie definitely. The humor and the humanity of her writing, how everyone is beautifully flawed but human. And the coziness of that, how she makes a little world, and you see what they're all eating and the deep interiors of the rooms look like. The other person I would say is Lorrie Moore, who writes her funny women so well, lightly anguished but ironic women.
What’s the state of the infidelity novel these days?
I think it had fallen out of fashion. And then Miranda July’s All Fours was such a huge hit that maybe the stock is on the rise for infidelity again. I think the culture was going in sort of a different direction, away from domestic fiction and the marriage novel. You just weren't seeing infidelity as the sole focus. You might see it as the impetus for divorce in the divorce novel. You were seeing a lot of divorce novels that were bitter or angry in tone.
Voyeurism plays a key role in this kind of fiction, and it’s where so much of the pleasure of The Ten Year Affair comes from. It's like you're sitting on their shoulders.
That's how I wanted it to feel. I think it’s my honest curiosity about other people. There’s a Q&A about the novel on my website, and one of my answers to myself is about how you go for a walk at night and how you catch a glimpse through someone's curtains and you see a party going on or people eating dinner or two people having a conversation. I always feel like that stuff is so evocative to me. It suggests one scene that can then suggest an entire novel. I never linger and look in, but you have a moment where you really wonder and want to know what's going on. That's the way I wanted the whole novel to feel, almost as if you're looking illicitly.
Is it a question of distance from the characters that achieves that?
Yeah, distance is really important and was something I borrowed from mid-century fiction. This very closely-controlled perspective where you know enough, but you might not know everything and it's all very sort of slick and put together in a very polished way. It helps create this feeling of glimpsing or something.
The original short story seemed like it was destined to be something more. It was featured in Best American Short Stories. Holly Hunter read it on NPR. At what point did you know you weren’t finished with those characters?
I was already working on the novel by the time the short story was published, and by the time it appeared in Best American. It was so hard to sell that I thought it was not going to. But I thought, There's a real spark here. Something is alive about this. Let me see if it actually is meant to be a novel. So I had already started to expand it. And then it sold as a short story, and it had this surprising little life, and I was kind of like, Oh shit. In thinking about the novel, it was also a question of staying true to the shorter form, to the spirit of it, and the texture of it, and also earning the longer length.
Why ten years?
Most of my fiction decisions are intuitive and language-driven. Like, it just sounds really nice: The Ten Year Affair. And then after I've had the thought, I think, Well, why? What do I like about this? I think the “why” that I landed on was, this is a narrative about two couples between the ages of 30 and 40. That's a pretty compelling, meaty decade where a lot of the big decision-making is done. You've perhaps chosen a partner, you make decisions about whether you're going to have kids. And it becomes a question of, Well, how do I find meaning after all these milestones have already passed? I'm entering middle age and it was exciting to me to try to write about what essentially could be a boring decade without much drama. I thought it was maybe an underexamined time of life.
There’s a compelling vanity to Cora and the denizens of this version of the Hudson Valley. You sense that people are at once pleased with themselves and also endlessly comparing their lives to others’. Triumphant and dissatisfied.
It’s something I was thinking about as I was writing the book. I live in the Hudson Valley, and what I see out here a lot among people who have just moved from the city is a feeling that they are better than the place somehow. Even though they are here too. They'll criticize the town, and they'll criticize the service in the restaurants as slow and crappy. And it's not that they're wrong, but it's like, you are here too. If everyone here is stupid, you are here too. So I wanted to show that there's something conflicted at the core of that thought. And you're right that it's arrogant. It's like, what marks you as different from the people in your little circumscribed world?
It seems even more exaggerated when it comes to parenting and looking at other people’s kids.
There's so much humor in just watching other parents be insane with their own children. I had a lot of fun with the kooky parenting techniques, which are all things that I've witnessed in real life. But it's the same thing where it's like, you are also in the baby group. In this book, it's such a narcissism of small differences thing.
What goes into knowing if something's funny for you?
A lot of it is feeling, but I also read everything aloud. Do you read aloud as you go? My ear sort of knows better than my writer's mind. I don't know if that makes sense. If it sounds funny to me, it confirms the humor. It’s almost like a muscle of its own, to identify a funny sounding phrase or sentence. And it exists in my intuitive mind more than when I'm trying to craft a funny joke. When I read aloud, I can usually hear if it's going to work. It's just practice with that stuff and trusting your taste. I don't really know where it comes from.
But I also thought it wasn't enough for the novel to be funny. I had to reach towards meaning or adjust towards meaning, and that I owed it to my reader to have it add up to something beyond just, This is a sort of funny book. For the tone, it was just like, What would Laurie Colwin do? How do I make it land in that place of non-corny feeling? Hopefully, it gets there.
That recent movie Splitsville reminded me of your novel. Do you have ideas of who would play these characters?
I can really see Greta Lee as Jules. Maybe a Duplass brother for one of the husbands. But I’ve never been able to see Cora. Maybe because she's the narrator and she feels too close. I'm too close to her consciousness. I can't let go enough to even picture a face. I don't even know if I could picture her face while I was writing it, which is kind of a weird thing. We know she's fair. We know she's freckled, and that she's taller than Jules. It would have to be someone without conventional sex appeal. I think it's harder to see the voice that you’ve lived in.
I want to talk about your book cover. It’s one of my favorites of the last few years.
I really love it too. My design reference points were “mid-century” and “classic.” I really asked for white and negative space, which is sort of a classic thing you'd see in a mid-century novel, a Richard Yates novel or something. I didn’t suggest a painting, but it's a contemporary painter named Shannon Cartier Lucy and I think it's an amazing, evocative painting. I have seen online that a lot of people have a visceral reaction to it in an almost negative way, which is interesting. Like, I don't know what's so off about it. It freaks me out. And I'm like, Oh, that's kind of good too, though. As long as people are feeling something when they look at it.
You and I met collaborating on this little independent magazine called Still Alive. The premise was: Essays on notable people, places, and things that are surprisingly still around. I wrote a piece on Michael Richards from Seinfeld, and then basically asked you to let me help edit the magazine. We did three print issues and it was easily one of my favorite writing experiences ever. We got Anne Carson to submit poetry! What were your hopes for that project? Do you think that those hopes were met?
My hopes were exceeded by a billion percent. I think that we made something really special. I would have liked to keep doing it for longer. It wasn't financially sustainable, but I think that we made three perfect issues and that they are amazingly good, full of writing by some of my favorite writers and writers that were new to me at the time and became some of my favorite writers. Everybody brought something special to it, and everybody was hilarious and thoughtful and weird and cool, and the art was amazing and the way it looked was amazing, and it was just a really cool project. I love that it's a thing that you can keep and have your hands on and have out in your home. From the perspective of a parent, I love to have magazines in the house because my kids get bored enough to pick them up, and then, suddenly, your 10-year-old is reading the Harper's Index. Just one of many magical things that can happen if you have print artifacts around.
What questions are you scared of being asked for The Ten Year Affair?
I'm braced for someone to ask about my personal experience of infidelity. I have done a lot of thinking about it, about what if I get asked that and what if people think that. What if people look at the cover and look at the huge ludicrous photo of me on the back and assume that this is autofiction, even though it's not stylistically autofiction? And I guess what I've landed on is: Who cares? I can't control what people think, and if it gets them through the door, maybe that's fine. Maybe it's fine that they make a bunch of assumptions about my personal life or whatever. Maybe they’ll read something they like or see a funny joke or an insight that they connect to. If it's some weird judgment about me that brings them to the book, I'm okay with that.
