The Ten-Year Affair
Intriguing premise, to me, as it starts with two characters meeting in a presumed baby group, mostly moms, but a heteronormative pair and the obvious, concomitant attractions. Right person, wrong lifetime, and an affair, of anything else, is out of the question.
But what happens in the imagination?
This novel brought up a singular remembrance, and I’ve alluded to this elsewhere, but I couldn’t find the point. I was at a “writers group” meet-up, nominally San Antonio mommy bloggers, and there was a child weaving in and around my legs. The kid belonged to the mom I was chatting with, and then, out of habit, having just been around my fishing buddy’s kids, I reached down, scooped the kid up and let it rest against my shoulder. Kid passed out. Kindred spirit, felt safe, and the mom had two others in tow, “If you want, you can take that one home with you…” I didn’t think it would go over well with my girlfriend, show up with a new grand baby in tow.
So far, in the novel, there are two parallel story lines. Or single line with two or more stories? In the real world, “IRL,” pop up those antiquated acronyms, in the novel’s real world, it is a chaste affair, but as a parallel reality, there’s a second plot line where the two characters are having a torrid affair.
The Ten-Year Affair
In my own work, and even in my own life, I’ve been faced with similar situations and that’s why it’s both comforting and uncomfortable at the same time.
In the story, the two characters are nearly the same age, and certainly the same station in life. In my own experience, it is usually, but not limited to, characters with a greater age discrepancy and from different positions, dissimilar backgrounds.
For the bulk of my own career, this has been about affairs of the heart. Again, comfortable yet uncomfortable.
The Ten-Year Affair
It takes time. Then? Always a baseball link?
“He was tan already and had a tattoo on his pec of the famous Citgo sign in Kenmore Square in Boston.” Page 70.
It’s a Fenway Park characteristic, done, I suppose with the overlay of a Boston (kind) of accent.
Difference, and intriguing as it crosses a decade, perhaps more, in less than two hundred novel pages.
Emotional without devolving into maudlin, real-life, without being too sappy, and the answers? Like life, messy and ambiguous.
The Ten-Year Affair
Good book. Really enjoyable novel.
Somers, Erin. The Ten-Year Affair. Simon & Schuster: NY, 2025.
