Erin Somers Has Written the Funniest Book about Infidelity You’ll Read All Year
9 min readErin Somers thought she was cooked. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and she had to balance her day job in journalism with parenting a young child during a global emergency, writing her sophomore novel, The Ten Year Affair, became a third-tier priority. “It’s curtains,” she says, recalling how agonizing it felt to watch the year-and-a-half she thought she’d be working on the novel pass her by. “With a second book, I had to decide what kind of writer I want to be and how to take that step while still sounding like myself,” she explains from her home in New York’s Hudson Valley. The Ten Year Affair makes unambiguous what kind of writer Somers is: one of the shrewdest observational comics of her generation.
The novel follows Cora, a 30-year-old happily married mother of two, who falls into mutual obsession with Sam, a father she meets at a local baby play group. The story unfolds in two parallel versions over 10 years: the real world, in which Cora and Sam don’t act on their desires; and the fantasy world, in which they go buck wild. Oh, and in the real world, Cora becomes closely enmeshed with Sam’s wife, Jules, an overachieving lawyer who beats Cora in every category (except, perhaps, at making her husband happy).
No one evokes the absurdity of everyday life like Somers. When Sam sends her a nude, Cora observes, “She could see Jules’s robe hanging from the back of the door and a child’s Croc on the ground. He had clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but he had not cleared the frame of Crocs.” When he invites her to a trendy restaurant, she thinks, “Who selected a place with a raw bar for a difficult conversation? Slurping seafood and crying. A hundred and fifty bucks a head to hear your life was ruined.”
The novel expands upon Somers’ short story of the same title, which was anthologized in the Best American Short Stories 2022. Somers doesn’t outline (“It feels like homework”), preferring instead to “follow the language, which tells me what to do next.” Spontaneity is an essential ingredient of funny writing, she explains, and even the most minor details—like the vasectomy-obsessed couple Cora meets through daycare, who “disconnected and reconnected the man’s cock from his balls whenever it suited them”—read like unplanned moments of brilliance that capture the exhausted striving of the middle-class millennial experience.
The last several years have laid quite the runway for a cultural moment that’s skeptical of traditional heterosexual relationships: Among other calamities, the COVID-19 pandemic shined a blinding spotlight on just how unequally men and women contribute in the domestic sphere; the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion; and a man accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women was re-elected president. It tracks that, after surviving and continuing to contend with this upheaval, there would be a major appetite among readers (who, market-wise, are mostly women) for juicy, well-written narratives that explore the myths, disappointments, and nevertheless persistent appeal of heterosexual marriage.
Novels about infidelity and divorce aren’t a new phenomenon. But unlike many classics, such as those by Philip Roth, John Updike, and John Cheever, this new league of “infidelity fiction”—which includes titles like All Fours by Miranda July, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and The Ten Year Affair itself—focuses on the inner lives of modern women. Somers describes The Ten Year Affair as her “riff on classic infidelity fiction.” It’s easy to imagine her wry, sharp, and deeply humane take becoming a classic in due time.
Over Zoom, Somers spoke with ELLE.com about not playing into the trope of the “unlikable” female protagonist, the failure of the everyday to meet our expectations, and which version of a life is the truer one—the reality or the fantasy.
Cora isn’t the “unlikable” narrator that many of us have come to expect from recent novels about, in BookTok parlance, “unhinged women behaving badly.” She’s witty and charming…but that comes with its own set of problems. What inspired you to write against the grain here?
The voice came to me intuitively; she was basically fully formed in there. In thinking through Cora and the other characters in the book, it was really important that none of them were fully “bad” and none of them were fully “good.” Just that they seemed complex; that they were fun to spend some time with; and that they reflected the experience of normal people who are trying and making mistakes and sort of flailing.
Where did Cora’s voice come from?
My female narrators are always a bit of a version of me. I always give my narrator some of my humor—a dry voice and a comic sensibility. A lot of her character is drawn from the people I see in my community: the type of woman who lives in the Hudson Valley, these overeducated but downwardly mobile people just arriving at early middle age in their 30s and 40s. I wanted her to be almost an everywoman of that experience, like a friend you might have.
I love when Cora’s husband, Eliot, asks why Cora’s book club isn’t reading the hot new romantasy book. And she’s trying to explain to him that these are women who went to Vassar, Bard, or Columbia. If it’s not The Master and Margarita, they may as well not have a book club.
They have certain ideas about themselves. Absolutely no shade to readers of book club fiction and romantasy fiction, but this is one of the pretensions that the women in this book have—they see themselves as intellectuals and creatives or creative-adjacent people.
Mothers are often sold the idea that their restlessness is an aesthetic problem or a mental load problem. But Cora lives in a town “with a waterfall five blocks from the pharmacy,” is in a close-to-equitable marriage, and doesn’t feel crushed by motherhood. What drew you to writing about the failure of a pretty good, everyday life to meet our expectations?
I wanted to write about a woman who—if we set up the two poles of contemporary life as a career and a family—does not fit in perfectly with either of those tracks. She is not a natural high-achieving type-A career person, but nor is she a person who is content to see herself as a mother and slot into domesticity without any friction. And so I wondered, How do you make meaning from your life if you don’t fit into either of those two categories? Where does meaning come from? And where do you turn when you find yourself unsatisfied?
I love that Cora is infatuated with a man who’s incredibly similar to her husband. It feels like she’s trying to sleep with a version of her husband who isn’t her husband. Was that always the case?
It’s like a narcissism of small differences. All these people are so similar; they’re of the exact same milieu. She wonders at points, Is it just that it’s a different person? And she finds that that’s not totally it.
Right, she’s not trying to sleep with the city clerk. That was one of my favorite moments—Cora and her friends hypothetically discussing hosting an orgy and wondering what if the city clerk shows up.
Yeah, the town’s too small to support swinging. You get there, and there’s the mail carrier.
Books about infidelity and divorce are especially zeitgeisty these days. I know it’s fraught to situate your own work within a cultural moment, but I’m going to ask you to do it anyway!
There’s been a lot of that work that excites me [recently]. I really liked All Fours and Big Swiss. It seems like people are really connecting with these books, and a lot of it has to do with the humor and how candid the writers are being. I think my book fits in with these others because it’s pretty frank about sex, and it is funny about sex, and sex is used to talk about human frailty.
The cover of your book features this understated, sensual image of what appears to be a man touching a woman’s hands. There’s a blurb on the front declaring it “the best book about adultery since Madame Bovary,” and the entire back cover is your black-and-white author photo. There’s a world where this book, like many books written by women, could have featured a woman in a bathing suit on the cover and been pitched as more of a fizzy, sexy read. Your book is sexy, but it’s also very literary. Can you talk about the way your novel has been positioned?
It’s been amazing. My publisher has really been on board with presenting it as a millennial riff on classic infidelity fiction, like the works of Updike and Cheever and Roth. The sort of “Great Man” photo on the back plays with that hilariously, because it’s, like, you turn this book over, and it’s just me back there. It suggests an importance—that literature could say something about culture that is big or have big ideas about culture, which is really exciting to me. I hope that books can make their way back to that place.
This is one of the funniest, most underline-able novels I’ve ever read. Lines like, “A man named Brandt had an ancestor named Ichabod. America really was incredible,” made me wonder if you had a blast writing it, or if the drafting and editing process still felt vaguely akin to self-harm.
I love the drafting process, because I really do make myself laugh. And I surprise myself. I sit upstairs in my little third-floor office looking out on my little town, and I’m having a good time. And then I sit down to revise it, and I’m miserable. I don’t know if that misery is escapable for writers.
So, you’re a first-draft queen?
That’s where I thrive. The drafting is bliss.
Which version of life is the truer one—the reality or the fantasy?
Not for me to say. I think that our inner worlds are as real and as sacred as our real lives. I think it’s that important, what’s going on in one’s mind, and we should protect it at all costs. There have been moments in my life where I felt so profoundly un-free, mostly when I was in school as a young person, that all I had to retreat to was my imaginative world and my inner life. It saved me.
Jules says to Cora that, more than looking for happiness, “Adults are after something else. They’re after something interesting. Interesting is better than happy.” Where do you stand on that idea?
I’m Team Happy. Jules is high when she says that. I want to be happy, and I want my family to be happy and my friends to be happy. It’s that simple for me. What Jules is talking about in that moment is possibly a rationalization that she’s using to explain her non-happiness to herself.
How did it feel writing this novel compared to your debut?
My debut, Stay Up With Hugo Best, I wrote much faster because there was not a global pandemic underway. The pandemic hit while I was drafting this novel, and I had a young child. My kid was with me at home, and I was doing my job, and I was trying to write a novel. So, the novel got sidelined to being priority three, to the point where I was like, “There’s probably not a future for me in this. Too many years will have passed, and I won’t find my way back to this work.” But, of course, everything eased up, and then I was able to work again. It took about four years as opposed to the two-and-a-half that I thought it was going to take to draft it. Four years doesn’t sound that crazy to me now. My feeling of it being a total catastrophe in the moment was overblown.
Finally, I like to ask every fellow internet-poisoned writer I know: What is your Instagram algorithm shilling you right now?
It shows me influencers wearing beautiful clothing. Depressingly, it’s also been showing me a lot of “how to get enough protein” content, because I think it knows that I turned 40. It’s all about how to get proper strength training and enough animal protein if you’re a woman over 40. I didn’t ask for this.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.