The vein of betrayal

A deft memoir of infidelity

Johanna Leggatt

Infidelity and Other Affairs

by Kate Legge Thames & Hudson $34.99 pb, 210 pp

When journalist Kate Legge’s husband of twenty-five years – former Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood – cheated on her with one of her girlfriends, she was discouraged from taking revenge in her most natural of forums: the printed word. Legge, who at the time worked as a features writer at The Australian newspaper, was lucky enough to have a wise adviser and fellow wordsmith discourage her from an impetuous dash to publish and be damned, or what Legge refers to as ‘every writer’s therapeutic reflex’. Instead, Legge, aware that the aftermath of an affair is not the time for momentous declarations or public confessions – and wanting to protect their two sons – adopts a double life: smiling grimly through workdays and functions, while internally afflicted by grief, self-hatred, fury, and an increased vigilance of her husband and his devices. When she discovers not one but two mistresses, she forwards the emails of one paramour to the other, puncturing any fantasies that they were unique in Hywood’s eyes.

Infidelity and Other Affairs was written more than a decade after Legge’s marriage came apart. While the work benefits from hindsight, it is clear the wound is yet to fully heal, although Legge is impressively restrained when meting out blame. The deceit must have been breathtaking. She was with Hywood for close to three decades; longer than she had known her own mother, who died when she was twenty-three. They enjoyed a life of shifting addresses, of setting up home in foreign cities and re-establishing routines and journalism careers in new places. They enjoyed a circle of close friends and holidayed with other couples. Hywood’s betrayal was with a woman whom Legge had once considered a close friend. Legge is a stylish writer, given to thoughtful and considered expression, and yet the most powerful moments are ones of telling brevity: ‘He called us quits,’ she writes after Hywood, whom Legge still calls her husband, moves to Sydney to helm a media company. When a letter of apology arrives from the mistress on grey Basildon Bond notepaper, Legge informs us drily: ‘I shredded it.’

Mercifully, the recounting of the affair is more than just a tragic story of broken vows and its impact on children. Legge does well to bring a freshness to a well-worn subject that this critic doubted was possible. Engaging and revealing, Legge spares us the sordid details of her husband’s trysts but exposes the full range of her emotional intelligence and her willingness to renounce the intoxicating role of victim and explore her cul- pability for the state of the union. There are attempts at making the marriage work – reigniting the passion through lingerie and marriage therapy – and the expression of these stories seems fundamental to Legge’s sense of self. Like many writers, she has an urgent need for truth-telling, to pen the impact of a trauma for her own sake rather than the sugar hit of revenge or to meet an audience’s desire for prurient details. She discovers a lineage of infidelity in her husband’s family history, and chides herself for not perceiving Hywood’s potential for deceit sooner:

I gave no thought to the vein of betrayal coursing through my husband’s family. There was a story that his grandmother on his father’s side had also taken a lover. If I had done my homework, I would perhaps have been better prepared for the possibility that monogamy would pinch at my husband’s toes.

The book proceeds in a haphazard fashion during its second half, with an extended essay devoted to Hywood’s family history of infidelity and how this exposure may have shaped his own proclivities. Yet the notion that infidelity has a genealogical component is not fully explored beyond a couple of cited studies and Legge’s question that just as ‘violence, addiction, political allegiance and even vocations’ may filter through generations, why not infidelity as well? Subsequent chapters are devoted to her family upbringing, her mother’s mental illness and early death, her father’s assuredness, and an uncle caught up, tragically, in the Petrov Affair. Legge shares her fears about climate change and her disdain for her former newspaper’s coverage of the environment, which prompted her retirement from the masthead. We read about her predilection for the occasional joint and the joys, discovered later in life, of walking in nature, of living alone.

These later essays lack the emotional honesty of the first one hundred pages – their insights are quotidian and hardly ground-breaking – and seem crudely tacked on to what is essentially a deft memoir of betrayal. Legge’s work would have benefited from a structural edit to develop a through-line binding the second half of the book to the first. Instead, the reader discovers early in the book the nature and outcome of her relationship with Hywood (and what he thinks of her writing this book, whose title he suggested), a denouement that signifies a natural conclusion to the work. As the work proceeds without this tension, the essays feel deflated, even rushed.

There is a clear intention, perhaps desperation on the publisher’s part, to turn Legge into Australia’s answer to American writer Lisa Taddeo – the covers are strikingly similar – with the press release proclaiming: ‘What Lisa Taddeo did for female desire, Kate Legge does for adultery.’ Taddeo is the author of the mesmerising Three Women (2019), a story that came together after painstaking research and immersive interviews conducted over many years. Legge gains nothing from such a poor comparison. She is not Taddeo – nor is she trying to be. There is much to admire about this work, but the structural issues and the attempt to shoehorn Infidelity and Other Affairs into the mould of another writer detract from the work and leaves the potential of the book largely unrealised. g