Women do have affairs – we just don’t like to talk about it
It is being hailed as the must-read novel of the summer. As her first work of fiction is published, Mary Loudon tells Rowan Pelling why she wanted to turn the concept of female infidelity upside down
‘Is it still infidelity if nobody lies?” This is the provocative strapline on the front cover of Mary Loudon’s first novel, My House is Falling Down.
It’s also the question that will keep book clubs up and down the UK enthralled all year. Loudon’s genius lies in knowing that, in the 21st century, an adulterous female is no longer particularly shocking. But a woman who confesses her love affair to her husband – from the first perilous text exchanges to the inevitable physical engagement – may be scandalous at best; a pariah at worst.
Loudon’s previous works have all been non-fiction, and include
Unveiled, a challenging and frank record of her conversations with nuns, and Relative Stranger, her award-winning memoir telling the very personal story of her search for her missing schizophrenic sister. It’s fair to say that the 52-year-old author’s forte is exploring complex emotional and ethical issues with great delicacy and insight.
It is partly this that makes her novel so compelling – and has already won it evangelical fans. I raced through it in one sitting and Loudon says she has had hundreds of emails from others saying they devoured it in the same urgent, page-turning way.
Partly, of course, it is also the subject matter, which prompted
an in-depth debate last week on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, ahead of Loudon’s appearance at the Hay Festival over the weekend.
The book is driven by searing desires and their consequences. What makes it different is that – as Loudon (pictured right), puts it – she has written “a love triangle where nobody is actually lying to anybody else”.
Fortysomething photographer Lucy lives with her artist husband, Mark, and their six-year-old twins. Her life seems settled but is a portrait of midlife dissatisfaction that will resonate with many readers; she is unsure about her work, her parenting and feels neglected by Mark.
When she meets pianist Angus (some 20 years her senior) at a party, she immediately senses the danger he poses: “He stopped talking to the person he was with and for longer than is customary on such occasions he gazed at me,” Loudon writes.
But rather than the customary secrecy, excitement and deceit that accompany stories of cheating, the story is turned on its head.
Lucy admits to her attraction and asks her husband what she should do. He reacts patiently and calmly. Surprised readers have reacted less so.
“These things happen, but they’re not talked about,” Loudon has said, by way of explanation. “Until we can broaden our conversation about love affairs and the fact that women also transgress, and that some men wait in the background the way, culturally and historically, women are supposed to have done, we’re not going to get as far as we need to.”
I meet Loudon – a striking, athletic blonde, with green eyes – to discuss how she came to write this enthralling novel, which challenges some of society’s deepest-rooted prejudices.
She looks me firmly in the eye and says, with precision: “I wanted to trawl my experiences, and my observations of other people’s relationships, in order to explore love, sex, marriage, guilt and truth really forensically. I also wanted very much to write about desire.”
The sex in the book – and there is quite a bit – is written from the inside out and perfectly captures the way people feel when overwhelmed by erotic intensity.
“Really powerful sexual attraction is in the mind and that allowed me to write lavishly about being both undone and completed by great sex,” explains Loudon. “It is about being completely subsumed by your own feelings for another person, as much as by the other person themselves.”
I point out that whereas Jane Austen asked “Will I find love?”, our generation worries about whether intense desire will endure.
“Now I’m 52, I think it’s crazy to assume that sexually passionate love will last easily over a lifetime,” she says.
“But that’s only sexual passion. There are so many forms. I’ve always been drawn to very clever men, who are witty and unusual. But this kind of person isn’t for beginners and it takes some growing up oneself to recognise and accept that. You want someone interesting? Fine, but with that comes complexity.”
She declines to be drawn into definitions of passionate attachment, only saying: “I couldn’t possibly attribute any one thing as
being essential to a partnership. When I was engaged to my husband, he went at 2am to a 24-hour chemist to buy me a hot-water bottle because I had period pain. That’s love.”
Loudon has been with her spouse, an academic, since 1995 and they have three daughters; 19, 17 and 13. Does she feel, like Lucy, that it’s possible to love two people at the same time?
“I don’t know how it would be to be erotically drawn to two people at the same time. Personally, I find that hard to imagine,” she says. “But to love two different people in different ways? That’s something that happens to so many people.”
Has it happened to her?
She replies carefully: “I’ve had quite a lot of experience with men and relationships. I got married at 30, after several lovely partners, who were significantly older. Of course, I’ve been in positions where timing has been a real b----r and overlaps have potentially been a problem. But that’s life.”
There are, Loudon feels, as many alternative responses to infidelity as there are couples; yet she’s at pains to stress “the sanctity of family life”, and says, for her, the most important thing is “my children growing up feeling completely loved, supported and safe, but also being exposed to as many different people and ways of seeing the world as possible”.
It’s clear she has written her novel as an artistic attempt to make readers question their own kneejerk judgments of the peccadilloes of others, as well as to subvert gender roles with her portrait of a man who remains patient in the face of his wife’s infidelity, and a woman who refuses to hide her desires.
“My hunch is that it is more socially acceptable for a married woman with children to have a deceitful affair, than to admit openly to loving someone else,” says Loudon.
She points out that we dismiss men’s infidelities “as we might swat away a fly at the window, but when a woman stretches the boundaries, people react as if she is undermining the fabric of our society”.
I remark that Lucy’s husband, Mark, also risks criticism because he believes his wife should follow her own path – flying in the face of traditional TV narratives, in which furious husbands kick their sobbing wives out into the street.
Loudon explains that Mark takes the long view. “He doesn’t regard Lucy as his, and yet he is devoted to her. One problem is that men are expected to behave aggressively when their partners let them down, yet there are plenty of men who wait, when waiting is the sanest thing to do.”
If neither character sounds likeable, that’s just how the author would have it. She plays with the reader, encouraging our sympathies to shift constantly between Mark, Lucy and Angus. Yet she is at pains to make it clear that no one judges Lucy’s behaviour more gravely than Lucy herself. It’s true that Lucy is palpably lacerated by her emotions; having a near-seizure when she mislays her engagement ring and constantly longing for the presence of her children. Even so, I imagine some readers won’t warm to her for leaping over the marital picket fence to pastures new.
Loudon responds briskly that when the novelist Julian Barnes encountered someone who complained that his characters were dislikeable he felt like putting stickers on his books, saying: “Warning: contains real human beings!”
I can attest that the conflicted, passionate Lucy couldn’t feel more real. I predict wives all over Britain buying this novel as their summer read – and husbands everywhere stealing it.
My House is Falling Down by Mary Loudon is published by Pan Macmillan (RRP £14.99). Buy now for £12.99 at books. telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
‘It’s more acceptable for a married woman to have a deceitful affair than admit to it’