Media Q&A

What is The Ten Year Affair about?

The novel follows Cora, a new mother who has recently left the city for a small town in the Hudson Valley, and Sam, a dad she meets in a baby group. The two are attracted to each other but sensible and considerate: they will not act on it. Yet as their connection grows stronger, and as their lives continue to intertwine, the romantic tension between them becomes all-consuming—until their worlds unravel into two parallel timelines. In one, they pursue their feelings. In the other, they resist. It’s about sex and class, marriage and family life, and about people whose lives have not turned out exactly the way they planned.

What made you want to write it?

It  began as a short story, I wanted it to be a riff on the mid-century infidelity fiction of Updike and Yates and Cheever, but with hapless millennials at its center. Millennials are aging and they’re moving upstate. They’re having kids and having doubts. I wondered: can they get out of their own way enough to have affairs? The story had a surprising life—it was selected by Andrew Sean Greer for Best American Short Stories, read on NPR by Holly Hunter. But I wasn’t done with the characters.  

What interests you about infidelity?

With infidelity the stakes are high and recognizable. It's sexy. It involves secrets, longing, concealment—all fun to write. But every infidelity novel is also a marriage novel, which is my real interest. The affair between Cora and Sam is the engine of the plot, but the book is also a portrait of two marriages over the course of a decade. Observing a marriage from outside gives me the same feeling I get when I'm on a walk and I see people through a window of their house. I glimpse the decor and I see them talking or just sitting on the couch watching TV and think, "what is their life?" I'm endlessly curious about how people live, the stuff they accumulate, their small habits, and relationship dynamics. This fascination—basically the desire to see inside of people's homes—is at the heart of the novel.

Why the Hudson Valley?

I've lived in Beacon, New York for eight years and I love it. Many of the towns in the area are middle class but culturally aspirational, populated by transplants from New York City with a specific set of values. The people here are expensively educated but cash poor. Even among the affluent, there is an anti-flashiness, different from what you see in the rich towns of Westchester or the suburbs of northern New Jersey. If someone's got money, you'll see a restored farmhouse—never a McMansion. The pretensions of the Hudson Valley are about intellectualism and taste, about appearing effortless, and about being good. A particular kind of vanity. In short, I think it's the perfect setting for a novel of manners. 

How much of the book have you borrowed from your own life?

I would say, I’m not Cora, but maybe I live just down the road from her. The people in the book are fabrications, but the milieu is similar to my own. I attended a baby group resembling the one in the novel where Cora and Sam meet. It was made up of a lot of anxious, well-meaning people with kooky ideas about childrearing. It delighted me. I loved hearing the parents' outlandish strategies and watching them interact in this really curious, competitive way. 

The relationships between men and women in the book are important, but Cora also has an interesting friendship with Sam's wife, Jules. 

Jules is a foil to Cora. Cora is this lovable, game person, and a bit of a slacker, while Jules is a conventional achiever, and somewhat spiky.  The women of my generation were taught that just being a mother and wife leads to desperation, but question now is where to put your energy. On the one hand, we have Jules who gives it all to work, and on the other, we have Cora, who is ambivalent about work and searches for meaning elsewhere. Maybe they represent the two paths of contemporary womanhood—you can try really hard or not try at all and you end up in basically the same place. It was a thrill to force these two unlikely friends into close proximity and watch them clash.

How did writing this book change the way you think about marriage?

An interesting thing is happening in heterosexual marriage in my generation, which is an openness about inequality in the division of domestic tasks and—among the college educated middle class anyway—an earnest effort to correct it. I think it’s become common for men to have some self-awareness around this. At the same time, women are ascendant in the workforce (a lot of the women I know are more successful than their husbands), and so household roles are shifting. This is exciting, but also creates uncertainty and frustration, so I wanted the novel to represent that. 

So, Erin, I have to ask: Do you want to have an affair?

No, thanks! I’m good! The novel gave me a chance to think through the consequences in excruciating detail. Especially in a small town, it seems like it can only lead to catastrophe, scandal, and embarrassment. Fun to read about for sure, but less fun to live.