ADULTERY [Hardcover]

Louise DeSalvo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1999

Louise DeSalvo risks all, in the company of Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller, and Madam Recamier. By filtering the story of her own husband's affair through other's stories, she revels in the always exciting fantasy and tells from the usually painful reality of adultery. The conclusions she draws, and the balance she finds in her marriage and in others, make ADULTERY a fun, poignant, and compassionate book.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 Publishers Weekly

In a tart and entertaining treatise on adultery, Hunter College professor DeSalvo (Writing as a Way of Healing) offers sometimes dueling perspectives based on personal experience and objective curiosity. Fueled by the memory of her husband's infidelity during the early years of their marriage and by her own indiscretions with respect to former boyfriends, the author seeks to examine why people cheat and why they then love to talk and write about their perfidy. Written in a breezy, stream-of-consciousness style, the book is more than a social critique. It also serves as a portrait of a marriage that has survived adultery, as a memoir of growing up under the threat of a father's violent outbursts and as an exploration of adultery's prominence in literature, from Dante's Divine Comedy to the Kinsey report. DeSalvo leaps from her husband to Colette, from minor anecdotes to major hypotheses, without sacrificing clarity or sincerity. The work is tied together by literature just as, DeSalvo speculates, adultery binds its participants through the process of storytelling. She stirs the still-smoldering embers of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair as proof that Americans love a good storyAand all the more if it involves sexual indiscretion. In attempting to map the "uncharted and often unpredictable emotional terrain" of adultery, she provides an intelligent and thought-provoking inquiry into why sexual infidelity will always fascinate us. Agent, Geri Thoma, Elaine Markson Literary Agency. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (October 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807062243
• ISBN-13: 978-0807062241
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,745,602 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful look at a complex subject, November 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: ADULTERY (Hardcover)

Speaking about her own experience as well as that of others with whom she has spoken, Louise Desalvo writes a thoughful book about the complex subject of adultery. This is not a self help book but rather a look at what motivates an adulterous relationship and an exploration of both the good and the harm that such a relationship brings.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Objective Look at a "Taboo" Subject, May 31, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Adultery (Paperback)

A very objective look at a "taboo" subject. The author's in-depth research and personal experiences offer that there is more depth to adultery and post-adultery life than typical thought trends would allow.