ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
To all the married folks listening, let me ask you a question. You ever have a crush on someone not your partner, maybe someone at work or in your friend group - nothing too serious? But then do you ever think about what would happen if, or how would it go if you grazed their hand or kissed or found yourselves in a hotel room together? In the new novel "The Ten Year Affair," our protagonist, Cora, thinks about it a lot, so much so that it blurs the line between what's real and what's just fantasy. Or maybe fantasies are real. Either way, author Erin Somers joins us now from our New York Bureau. Hey, Erin.
ERIN SOMERS: Hey. How are you?
LIMBONG: You know, pretty good (laughter). Pretty good. This book has rocked me a little bit. So Cora lives in a small suburb in the Hudson Valley when we meet her, right? She's married. She's got two kids. She's got a toddler and an infant. And she meets Sam at a baby care class. What is it about him, about Sam, that attracts her?
SOMERS: Well, I think that there is a feeling of him just being anyone but her husband at first - just a feeling of the other and a feeling of someone unfamiliar. But he also is charming and handsome, and they have a sort of chemistry that they can't explain.
LIMBONG: Did Cora think she'd end up in the 'burbs with a house and a husband and kids?
SOMERS: I don't think anybody living in Brooklyn thinks that that's going to happen to them.
(LAUGHTER)
SOMERS: I certainly didn't.
LIMBONG: Yeah.
SOMERS: Part of it is that she is a little bit deflated that this is where she ended up. And, you know, it's not sexy. It's not a fantasy. It's taking your kids to school every day and then doing your remote job. So yeah, I think she had more glamorous ideas for herself.
LIMBONG: So the book sort of splits off into two parallel tracks, right? Like I mentioned before, there's, like, the fantasy version where Cora has an affair with Sam, and then you get reality. Why was this your approach to writing about infidelity?
SOMERS: Well, the conceit came to me intuitively, actually. I sat down to write, and I did not know that it was going to go in that direction until I typed the word multiverse into the draft. And then I thought, I should follow that. That would be a really cool idea. You don't see a multiverse plot mixed with domestic fiction much. So I thought it could bring a real freshness to the subject matter. Then there was the question about execution, whether I could pull it off. But I thought it would be really fun to try. So I followed it.
LIMBONG: There's some details in this book that are unique to a certain class of people, at least Cora and Eliot. They're not rich, right? They're not loaded. But they're doing, I think, like, just well enough to feel guilty about it, right? There's moments where after they buy a house and people come over, they have to point out and be like, oh, but, you know, this thing - there's this problem with it. There's that problem with it, sort of apologizing for having, you know, the scratch to, you know, buy a house. What do you think is driving that sort of guilt?
SOMERS: Well, it's a send-up of this very narrow segment of the population near where I live, this very small milieu of downwardly mobile, overeducated millennials who are clinging to the bottom rung of the middle class and feel a little guilty about it because they're supposed to not even have been able to enter the middle class. People who do sometimes feel a compulsion to apologize for it or to disavow the house to say, you know, it's a pretty crummy house, and here's what's wrong with it, which I find kind of funny, and I wanted to poke fun at a little bit.
LIMBONG: I - like, I've since caught myself doing it, since I read your book. And then I had people over to the crib, and I was like, oh, the leaking roof. And it's like, I think I'm doing that thing (laughter). I don't know where it's coming from.
SOMERS: I mean, it doesn't come from a bad place. It comes from a place of precarity. Like, you're - we've been so precarious - people my age - for so many years that it's like, it feels - it all feels very temporary, like it could go away. And it feels like you're not showing class solidarity if you get some tiny scrap of something, you know...
LIMBONG: Yeah.
SOMERS: ...Some modest home or something like that.
LIMBONG: You know, when we're talking about this very specific milieu that you had mentioned, like, we're talking about white people, right (laughter)? We're talking about - or mostly, right? Is that who you're thinking of? Like, the - when I'm thinking of the Hudson Valley suburbs, it is a mostly white place, right?
SOMERS: Mostly white, and that is part of their blinkered worldview and part of the comedy around their blinkered worldview.
LIMBONG: Yeah. When I pitched this book to my editor, I sort of made, like, a funny joke that, like, well, us millennials are now, like, old enough that we're in long, unhappy marriages and getting divorced and stuff like that, right? But in talking to you about these domestic dramas, it seems like these stories are repeatable throughout generations. But I'm wondering, what do you think makes it unique for this generation?
SOMERS: The reason I wanted to write about it is I was thinking about some of those, you know, material conditions that caused the infidelity novel boom after World War II. And I was thinking about the middle class then versus the middle class now. And those books are very much about maybe coming back from the war, trying to make a life and finding middle class empty and difficult to deal with for nebulous reasons. And I thought, well, things have only gotten more difficult since then. You know, like, it's not that easy to have a comfortable life anymore. And it's not that easy to, you know, have the sort of stereotypical two cars, house in the suburbs, take your kids on vacation. Like, this is not an attainable thing anymore, and none of these signifiers even mean the same thing. Marriage doesn't mean the same thing. So I wanted to sort of dig into what that looks like now and how things have gotten even worse, and in some ways, how they've gotten better, you know? Men do some of the domestic work. It - that...
LIMBONG: Yeah (ph).
SOMERS: ...Has only improved. Sure.
LIMBONG: Yeah. That's author, Erin Somers. Her new book, "The Ten Year Affair," comes out Tuesday. Erin, thank you so much.
SOMERS: Thanks for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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