Seven top books about marital affairs

Katherine Ashenburg is the prize-winning author of two novels, four non-fiction books and hundreds of articles on subjects that range from travel to mourning customs to architecture. She describes herself as a lapsed Dickensian and as someone who has had a different career every decade. Her work life began with a Ph.D. dissertation about Dickens and Christmas, but she quickly left the academic world for successive careers at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a radio producer; at the Toronto newspaper The Globe and Mail as the arts and books editor; and most recently as a full-time writer.

Ashenburg's new novel is Her Turn. In it, Liz, a divorced newspaper editor, finds her tidy life overturned when the woman now married to Liz’s ex-husband submits a personal essay to the column Liz edits. Wife #2 has no idea that she is sending her essay to Wife #1, and Liz decides to keep that a secret, with surprising results. Elizabeth Renzetti writes of it, “It is infused with the joyful spirit of Nora Ephron and lit with a charm all its own.”

At Lit Hub Ashenburg tagged seven favorite thought-provoking infidelity narratives, including:

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

When gentle, New Age Charis wonders why her so-called friend Zenia has murdered her beloved chickens, another friend tells her, “Because she’s Zenia… Don’t fret about motives. Attila the Hun didn’t have motives. He just had appetites.” Other than minor cruelties like the slaughtered chickens, Zenia has appetites for other people’s money and—especially—other women’s men. Atwood’s wickedly funny page-turner centers on the havoc Zenia wreaks on three college acquaintances as she picks off their men one by one, then discards them.

Charismatic and beautiful, with a cloud of dark hair and breasts that grow and a waist and nose that get smaller, she has an infinite stream of pathetic stories about a mysterious cancer and her difficult beginnings—as a Romanian gypsy, a White Russian, a Berlin Jew, a Greek girl abused by an Orthodox priest. Men fall for her hard-luck stories like ninepins.

Although Zenia almost always profits in some way from her liaisons, that seems secondary to the playful exercise of her cruel superpowers. Lorrie Moore called her “Iago in a miniskirt,” and the random malignity she shares with Shakespeare’s villain makes her especially frightening. The only reason for the carnage she leaves in her wake, from heartbreak to suicide, is “Because she’s Zenia.”

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue