Erin Somers, "The Ten Year Affair: A Novel" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Episode Summary

Podcast: New Books Network — Burned by Books

Host: Chris Holmes
Guest: Erin Somers, author of The Ten Year Affair
Date: November 5, 2025
Book Discussed: The Ten Year Affair (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

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1. Episode Overview

This episode features a rich, incisive conversation between host Chris Holmes and novelist Erin Somers about her new novel, The Ten Year Affair. The book traces the emotionally and psychologically complex journey of Cora, a married mother, as she navigates the imagined and real tensions of a decade-long near-affair with Sam, also married. The discussion delves into modern infidelity, the reality of adult friendships, the nuances of happiness, and the existential weight of aging, all explored through Somers’ trademark humor and acute observational wit.

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2. Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Novel’s Originality: Infidelity Through Parallel Lives

• Novel’s Conceit (05:13–06:00):
  Holmes praises the book’s dual narrative structure—alternating between Cora’s real and fantasized affair—remarking on its rare, decade-spanning exploration of desire and responsibility.
• Origin Story (06:00–08:09):
  Somers describes how the concept sprang intuitively from her experiences in a Brooklyn baby group, initially intended as a short story before evolving, almost magically, into a narrative involving a “multiverse” of parallel emotional realities.

“It was one of those really magical and incredibly rare writing moments where it just came out like one idea led to the other.”
— Erin Somers [07:08]

Satire of Modern Parenting

• Baby Group Inspiration (06:20–09:17):
  Holmes and Somers bond over the comedic—and at times absurd—scenes from the novel drawn directly from real-life baby group experiences (“people who are parenting the most, doing things they've seen on the Internet...” [06:33]).
• Memorable Scene: Early Potty Training (08:20–09:29):
  Somers confirms an outlandish anecdote (potty training a six-week-old), noting the empathy and social fascination in such moments.

“At first she was running with a six week old baby into the bathroom every few minutes and holding the baby over the toilet as if the baby might begin potty training…”
— Erin Somers [08:23]

Characterizing Marriage and Elliot, the Husband

• Avoiding the ‘Evil Husband’ Trope (09:49–12:05):
  Somers made Elliot, Cora’s husband, likable and complex to heighten the emotional conflict, resisting easy moral binaries.
• The Everyday as Erosion (09:49–10:57):
  Holmes observes that the ordinary accrual of daily routine and minor annoyances nudges relationships toward existential questions.
• Single Most Attractive Day (12:05–12:58):
  Holmes and Somers discuss how Elliot’s appeal can be lost to routine, only to be suddenly noticeable again—a motif of how time and habit distort perceptions of those closest to us.

“I wanted him to be cool and kind of a goofy slacker...that's what makes the problem so intractable.”
— Erin Somers [10:57]

Humor’s Role in Difficult Material

• Humor as Lifeblood (12:58–15:19):
  Holmes calls Somers “one of the great humor writers” and explores how wit enables both character and reader to grapple with high-stakes personal disaster.
• Crafting Humor (13:51–14:58):
  Somers admits humor is central—“the thing that gets me to the desk and keeps me interested in a project”—and that she reads lines aloud to her husband to test their impact.

“Humor’s a way of being a friend to your reader and inviting the reader in… It is just the key to my writing.”
— Erin Somers [14:43]

Read-Aloud: Satirical Baby Group Scene

• Infamous Scene (15:19–19:22):
  Somers performs a vibrant excerpt, capturing the surreal competitiveness and performativity of parenting and birthing experiences—eliciting laughter and tears from the host.

“Here, she said. She...shoved one [earbud] in Cora's ear...listening to the voice of a woman describing the orgasm she'd had during labor.”
— Erin Somers (as Liz) [16:33]

Female Friendship and Social Complexity

• Friendship as Secret Theme (20:52–22:16):
  While the novel is an affair story on the surface, Somers explains that the friendship between Cora and Sam’s wife, Jules, provides a vital undercurrent—“Trojan Horsed in there”—for exploring the tangle of intimacy, alliance, and rivalry among adults.

“Cora’s friendship with Jules is a really compelling piece… it's so, so tangled and so fraught.”
— Erin Somers [21:32]

Happiness, Adulthood, and Desire

• What Is Happiness? (23:19–25:09):
  The hosts discuss Jules’ pronouncement (“Happiness is only for children...adults are after something else. Interesting is better than happy.” [23:53]), wondering if this is a wisdom or just a rationalization of adult disappointment.
• Happiness Redefined (25:09–26:16):
  Somers suggests that happiness in adulthood often comes from unexpected small moments, not the conventional milestones we anticipate.

“It’s none of the things that you think it’s going to be. It's like some quiet thing that's over to the side is where happiness can be found.”
— Erin Somers [25:35]

Fantasies vs. Reality: The Emotional Weight of Imagination

• Making Imagined Affairs Real (26:16–28:19):
  Somers wanted Cora’s fantasy affair to mirror real relationships, including “deflating or depressing things” such as arguments or even abortion, not just passion.
• The “Full Menu” of Feelings (28:19–29:01):
  Both literal and emotional pleasures and pains are essential to feeling alive; Cora is “hungry for life” and craves the full spectrum, which she pursues through fantasy.

“I want every feeling. I want to know it all. And even...that's going to include pain and loss.”
— Erin Somers [28:34]

Covid as Accelerant of Alienation

• Covid’s Metaphorical Role (29:01–30:24):
  The pandemic, while not the novel’s focus, functions as a narrative accelerant, intensifying characters’ loneliness and driving them toward risk and introspection.

“It was an accelerant for alienation and isolation. It caused many people to become lonely in new and terrible ways…”
— Erin Somers [29:36]

The Urgency of Aging, Death, and Taking Emotional Risks

• Midlife and Existential Anxiety (30:24–33:01):
  The characters’ proximity to 40 brings heightened awareness of mortality—and a compensatory, sometimes “frenzied” drive to squeeze meaning from life, often tipping into infidelity and other impulsive acts.

“We gotta live our lives. We're gonna die.”
— Erin Somers [32:54]

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3. Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On crafting from life:
  “I'm sort of humble enough at this point in my career to follow those ideas that emerge organically.”
  — Erin Somers [07:56]

• On the power and perils of imagined lives:
  “Why is she...having something fraught...happen to her in her fantasy life?...It follows the rhythms of a real affair.”
  — Erin Somers [26:55]

• On what makes adults happy:
  “It's like some quiet thing that's over to the side is where happiness can be found.”
  — Erin Somers [25:35]

• On life’s brevity:
  “We gotta live our lives. We're gonna die.”
  — Erin Somers [32:54]

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4. Key Timestamps (MM:SS)

• 05:13 – Introduction to The Ten Year Affair’s premise
• 06:00 – Somers explains origins of the novel and the “multiverse” concept
• 08:20 – Real-life inspiration for absurd baby group scenes
• 09:49 – Discussion on making Elliot a complex, non-villainous husband
• 12:39 – The concept of “single most attractive day”
• 13:51 – The centrality of humor to Somers’ writing process
• 15:38 – Read-aloud: parent group scene; technique behind character creation [19:22]
• 20:52 – On the deep complexity of friendship between women
• 23:53 – Jules’ pronouncement on happiness and adulthood
• 25:35 – Observations on how adult happiness shifts
• 26:55 – The emotional depth and realism of imagined affairs
• 28:19 – The “full menu” line and craving the breadth of experience
• 29:36 – Covid’s role as metaphor and emotional accelerant
• 31:47 – The urgency and anxiety of aging; mortality as context for risk
• 33:28 – Somers’ book recommendations

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5. Book Recommendations

From Erin Somers:

• Flesh (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) by David Slay (sp?):
  “It’s very intense, very surprising...unbelievably well executed.” [33:28]
• Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt (NYRB):
  “…About a grandmother who has to raise her granddaughter… It’s funny. It’s beautiful. That’s the novel that I’ve been recommending to absolutely everyone in every corner of my life.” [35:29]

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6. Tone and Style

The conversation is warm, approachable, and shot through with wry humor—mirroring Somers' novel itself. Both host and guest keep the discussion lively, open to laughter, and unafraid to dwell on the sadness, poignancy, and absurdity of modern life.

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7. Conclusion

This episode powerfully unpacks the psychological, social, and existential stakes of The Ten Year Affair, while also providing a window into Erin Somers’s process, thematic concerns, and highly original voice. Listeners gain both a deep tease of the novel’s pleasures and insights into life’s grand messiness—delivered with compassion, intellect, and wit.

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Transcript

[Marshall Poe]

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[Chris Holmes]

Be not therefore anxious for the morrow. Matthew chapter 6.

[Erin Sommers]

Each day will have its troubles, but.

[Chris Holmes]

By God's grace they can be survived.

[Marshall Poe]

Use the Rebind Study Bible App's chat function to ask questions and get answers in real time. That's thought provoking discussion and analysis rooted in decades of research and wisdom from more than 40 scholars at your fingertips. The Rebind Study Bible App is a new way to experience the Bible with enhanced depth, at your own pace in the moments you have. Search the Apple App Store for Rebind Study Bible or go to rebind app.com newbooks network for a free seven day trial. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Production. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Chris Holmes]

I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Roman Alamo. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous [e-mail] and on Instagram and Twitter earnedbybooks. Let's start the show. Cora is living her best life, happily married in the Hudson Valley, two children, a successful husband and a good job with prospects. But life has other things in mind for her. When she meets Sam, also married with children, presumably happy, they begin a flirtation that causes a rift in Cora's conception of reality in which parallel tracks of her life appear. One fantasy in which her closeness to Sam evolves into a full blown affair with sexual desire and a full suite of emotional apexes in the other track. Ordinary life proceeds apace, children take over the house and all available time and energy. Jobs become boring and unfulfilling. Friends make absurd and comical life decisions. But Sam exists for Cora in both the invented and physical worlds, and his presence isn't abating. Such is the fascinating conceit of Aaron Sommers latest novel, the Ten Year Affair, in which desire and responsibility, happiness and contentment all get run through the washer of Aaron's piercing intellect and one of a kind wit. Cora does not dive into the empty swimming pool of infidelity blindly. In fact, her fantasies allow her to check precisely the density of the concrete and the unforgiving depths of that kind of plunge. But if we know anything about humans, it is that when presented an option for self annihilation, they will take it. Nine times out of ten in a narrative voice that skewers all with delight, we find ourselves wondering whether or not the annihilation might be worth it in the face of COVID aging, disappointment, and maybe even just boredom. A comic novel of the first rate, Aaron Summers has given us a vision of modern infidelity that is less about sex and desire than it is just plain humanity. Erin Summers is a reporter and news editor at Publishers Lunch. Her first novel, Stay Up With Hugo Best, I cannot recommend Enough, was a Vogue Best Book of the year in 2019. Her writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, New York Magazine, the Atlantic, Esquire, gq, the best American short stories, so I guess just all of them. She lives in Beacon, New York with her family. Welcome to Burned by Books.

[Erin Sommers]

Aaron Sommers thank you for having me. What a great intro.

[Chris Holmes]

I've been dying to have you on since I read Stay Up With Hugo Best, which was the funniest book I read that year, easily, and I still remember scenes from but the, you know, the Ten Year Affair has this wonderful conceit which I described of these two parallel existences for the flirty and increasingly intense friendship between these two married people with children, Cora and Sam. And of course, we recognize these fantasies from novels and from real life, but you've done something original and played that fantasy out over a decade. How'd you come up with this new version of the Amer imagined affair? And did it play out the way you initially intended? Did Sam and Korra end up where you first imagined?

[Erin Sommers]

So the concept first came to me intuitively when I sat down to write a short story around a baby group because I had had my first daughter and I didn't have any friends with kids. And so I sought out companionship in a baby group in Brooklyn. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and I loved what I saw there in terms of just like, it was ridiculous.

[Chris Holmes]

Some of the best scenes in the novel are in the baby groove.

[Erin Sommers]

It was a lot of very well meaning people doing a lot of outlandish parenting techniques. People who are parenting the most, you know, doing things they've seen on the Internet and things they've read about and trying it all out in real time. And I was fascinated. And I thought, this is a setting and a milieu that is ripe for send up. And so I put it in my pocket until it sort of synthesized with another idea or I could find a way in to write about these people. And finally when I sat down to write it, I didn't even quite know that it was going to synthesize with an affair narrative. And I just sat down to write it. And it, the short story version, it was one of those really magical and incredibly rare writing moments where it just came out like one idea led to the other. And I hit on the conceit of the multiverse. I didn't hit on that until I typed that word into the draft and I began to describe her. Her imagined affair that way. And then I thought, why don't I follow that? You know, my unconscious has coughed up this great idea and I should take advantage of that if I can execute it. And yeah, so that's kind of where it came from. It just came out of the language intuitively of the short story. And, you know, I'm. I'm sort of humble enough at this point in my career to follow those ideas that emerge organically.

[Chris Holmes]

Hmm. So I have to ask, in your real life baby group, was there someone who was actively potty training their, like, infant?

[Erin Sommers]

Yeah, that's where I got that.

[Chris Holmes]

Oh, my God.

[Erin Sommers]

That was fully for real. And it was, at first, it was a woman who was there Was it was in the back room of a, of a children's clothing store and possibly it was a toy store and there was a bathroom back there. And what she was actually doing, she didn't have a little potty with her at first. At first she was running with a six week old baby into the bathroom every few minutes and holding the baby over the toilet as if the baby might begin potty training that and then as the baby got older, she did begin carrying a potty with her and would set the baby on it before it could really sit down. And I just remember having so much empathy for the baby who is a person. You know, babies are people and oblivious to, to this happening really. And I just thought it was such fascinating behavior to be doing publicly is amazing.

[Chris Holmes]

Amazing. And the, and in the novel the, the baby is successfully potty trained. But did that concur with the, the reality?

[Erin Sommers]

The baby was successfully potty trained in reality.

[Chris Holmes]

Oh my.

[Erin Sommers]

I mean she broke the baby's spirit and the baby, the baby was doing it. And so you know, on the one hand it was, you know, we can make our judgments about it but on the, on the other hand she did what she set out to do.

[Chris Holmes]

I mean she's a fascist. But you know, just as the fascists make the trains run on time, like she made the baby potty train, so fine. So. One of the starkest differences between the Ten Year Affair and most novels of infidelity that I've read is that Korra's husband Elliot is, is not horrible at all. In fact, he is in many ways quite wonderful. The problem for Elliot is the problem for relationships that age. People begin to exist as habit for each other rather than as ravenous choice. The quotidian every day starts to dim the best qualities of a partner and traits that were endearing become annoying and sometimes gross. How did you handle your development of Elliot's character arc? He sometimes feel like. It feels like he is standing still as this dynamic world of desire and its opposites move around him. But we still get through Korra. A multi textured vision of him. Ultimately it's a bit of a magic trick. So how'd you do it?

[Erin Sommers]

I loved writing him and he instantly felt real to me. What I wanted to do with Elliot was deliberately not make him the evil husband who she should obviously leave and. Or for who you're rooting for her to cheat on. I wanted him to be cool and kind of a goofy slacker and I wanted the reader to be able to see their rapport and See that they loved each other, and that's what makes the problem so intractable. And yeah, he is sort of a grounding force of the novel. He doesn't have. He doesn't change that much. But I will say it was important to me to let Elliot keep his dignity, like, not to humiliate over much and also to, in the end, give him a little bit of redemption, like, allow the reader to see that he was not so oblivious as, as maybe Korra thought the entire time. And he knew more and he was being sort of generous with her and allowing her to, to flail and to figure things out.

[Chris Holmes]

That's a great way to, to put it. And he, you know, there's a. There's a wonderful, wonderful moment at a swimming pool where he's described as having his, like, most handsome or most attractive day. And all of a sudden we're like, as readers, we're like, oh, wait, he's. He's very attractive. Like, these other women are like, judging themselves to make themselves look good for him. And it's, it's funny how easily that's lost when the kind of like, serotonin overload of, of desire gets in the way.

[Erin Sommers]

Exactly. And I love that idea of everybody getting a single most attractive day.

[Chris Holmes]

I feel like mine is already done, though, so now I have nothing to look forward to.

[Erin Sommers]

You never know. Elliot's like, you know, how old is he? He's. They're. Middle age. It could, it could still be coming for you.

[Chris Holmes]

Okay, all right, good. I'm. I'm holding out for it. You are one of the great humor writers working today. Certainly you're in my top five. And Hugo Best was the funniest thing I read that year. And the humor here in this novel courses through the body of the novel, even when it's about the most serious things with the most serious consequences. It's also the lifeblood for Quora in many ways, who kind of lives on a diet of satire and irony, but also for the reader who depends on your humor to reveal what's most important about the high stakes personal disasters. How does humor come into your craft? Is it what draws first blood for you, or does it get layered as you're going? And how central it is, is it to your ability to work through difficult topics?

[Erin Sommers]

You know, I always worry when I sit down to write something or start something new, what if I'm not funny this time? You know, like, what if somehow I've lost the ability to be funny because it's really the thing that gets me to the desk and keeps me interested in a project is I get to be funny. I get to sit down and amuse myself and try to surprise myself. So it is the very foundational element of what I'm doing, I think. And I am always pushing to be funnier, to be more precise and surprising and make the dialogue funnier. And I think it's important. It's like humor's a way of being a friend to your reader and inviting the reader in and inviting the reader to instantly connect and to identify. And I think it is just the. The key to my writing completely.

[Chris Holmes]

Do you trust your gut when about something being funny or do you need an outside reader to kind of test it for you?

[Erin Sommers]

I usually know, but I do read exchanges aloud to my husband to see if he laughs. I will make. I'll be like, come up here. I need. You know, I'm in. I have an office on the third floor of our house and I'll make him come upstairs and dutifully listen to something I've written to see like, and then watch the reaction on his face to see if it's hitting.

[Chris Holmes]

Would you read from what I think of in my mind as a now infamous scene from the novel. It's at a parent baby group where Sam and Cora first met. And then it concerns a new member who's very excited to talk about to Cora about her very special birth experience.

[Erin Sommers]

I'd be happy to. One of the moms who was always at the group had white lady dreads and wore brown hemp pants with a brown hemp shirt. She sat beside Cora the next week, where Sam usually sat and introduced herself as Liz. Kora started to tell her the spot was saved, but then felt stupid and didn't. She texted Sam, are you coming? No response. Liz laid her baby out in front of her. It was one of those big babies you sometimes saw 99th percentile legs like stacked marshmallows. Miles looked measly by comparison. The baby dragged herself towards him and put a hand in his eye. Cora gently removed it. Liz said, yeah, she grabs eyeballs. Sorry, Bonnie, knock it off. Bonnie spotted a wooden dog in the vicinity of broccoli mom and lost interest in Miles. Liz began describing a podcast she'd heard about women who had orgasms while giving birth. It was fascinating. She said it hadn't been studied as much as it should have because it impacted only women. If men were the ones who had babies, you'd better believe there'd be exhaustive research by now. There'd be a pill you could take to make it easier for you to get off while giving birth. Here, she said. She fished in her bag and pulled out a grubby tangle of earbuds. She straightened them out and plugged them into her phone and before it was clear what was happening, shoved one in Cora's ear. She put the other in her own ear, and they sat listening to the voice of a woman describing the orgasm she'd had during labor. I came so hard, said the voice. I never wanted it to stop. It felt different from sex because it was the pressure. It's hard to describe. It originated inside me, on the other end, the top. And as it was happening at the height of it, there was a baby forcing its way through me, through my gigantic cervix. The door. Sorry. The door opened and Sam entered and took off his shoes. He wore socks printed with fur trees and a chambray shirt. His jeans were only mildly, mildly terrible. Cora knew by then that his baby was named Penelope, and she was exactly one week older than Miles. She took the earbud out. Okay, I mean, that's awesome. But Sam settled in on the other side, mouthing, sorry, I had an orgasm during labor, said Liz. Or anyway, I was close. That's why I'm interested. They say it happens with big babies. She motioned at the pale globe of Bonnie's head. It either totally you up forever or you come. Cora caught Sam's eye and looked away to keep from laughing. Again he offered her a toothpick, and again she accepted. What was your labor like? Liz asked Cora. Did you come? Cora had received an epidural in her spine and a button she could press for more Percocet. She pressed it a lot, even after the nurse told her to taper off so she could feel when to push. She definitely hadn't come. Both of her births had been routine and terrifying, primitive in spite of the technology. So much blood, plus a placenta that came flopping out of you at the end like a jellyfish. It was normal, said Cora. Three days in the hospital. A hospital? Said Broccoli Mom. Interesting. Is that bad? No, of course not. It's a choice every woman has to make for herself. Personally, I was too afraid of the cascading interventions to consider a hospital. If things don't move fast enough, they induce you, and before you know it they're giving you a C. Not to mention the high mortality rates for mothers of color. Cora looked at her for a long moment. You're white. Yes, but it's the principal, said Broccoli Mom. Anyway, my doula is a genius, and my birth experience was life changing for both me and my partner. All birth experiences are life changing, said Sam. They result in a baby. He shimmied Penelope out of her tiny hoodie and placed her on her stomach. Cora's relief at his being there was immense.

[Chris Holmes]

Thank you so much. I don't think I've ever, like, actively cried during someone reading it, but there's so many lines in there that are just. They're just amazing. And there's. There is something about the fact that it is labor that's being talked about and this extraordinary. Just the friction between this woman's kind of ecstatic remembrance of her incredibly large baby, like, coming out of her cervix and this, like, you know, sexual pleasure. And then the amazing internal description Korra has of just trying to hit the Percocet as much as she can. Could you tell me a little bit about how you crafted this scene?

[Erin Sommers]

I just, you know, some of those side characters really spring to life fully formed, and the. The women of the baby group were that.

[Chris Holmes]

I hate Broccoli mom, by the way. I hate. I hate her so much.

[Erin Sommers]

Yeah, Broccoli Mom. So Broccoli mom came to me sort of fully formed, and so did this woman, Liz. And really with the. With the characters that you don't have to necessarily make fully round, they're just really fun because you can make them silly and then they're gone. You know, they don't wear out their welcome by being sort of over the top, and they are the most fun to write. So that's how. That's how the, like, various members of the baby group came to be.

[Chris Holmes]

Uh, in order to stay in each other's lives in a real way without necessarily sleeping together. Sam and Quora concoct ways to intertwine their family lives, with Korra spending an increasing amount of time with Sam's wife Jules. At least in a surface way, they become friends and confide in one another. This does great work of deepening the practical and emotional cost of an affair. You lose friendships, families, a way of life, but it also asks what we think we know about our closest friendships. Can you talk about the role of friendship in the novel and how it has different forms of meaning and ways that it illuminates other aspects of our life?

[Erin Sommers]

The book is an affair novel, but it's also secretly friendship novel. Trojan Horsed in there. I think that Cora's friendship with Jules is a really compelling piece of the novel because it's so, so tangled and it's so fraught. And they get along, but they don't get along. They are kind of opposites, but they. Cora does find Jules darkly appealing. And so I never tired of digging into interactions between the two of them. And I found it really fun and really interesting to imagine what it looked like for these two women to raise children side by side for 10 years.

[Chris Holmes]

Hmm.

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[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, Jules, for me, at times feels very unlikable. Although it's the lech Richard that runs away with the prize. But she is infinitely relatable. She's work and sometimes status obsessed and fundamentally unhappy, even when her life seems ordered and content. But when she has a real affair that comes undone, she's thrown. When she's thrown over for a much younger woman, she comes to a stark conclusion. Happiness is only for children, she says. It's like when you're eight and you get an ice cream, a cotton candy. My kids are happy. They're happy because the things they want are attainable. They want something. I get it. For them, adults are after something else. They're after something interesting. Interesting is better than happy. That feels both catastrophic and so undeniably true that it's difficult to read the words aloud. Is Jules wrong?

[Erin Sommers]

I don't know if she is. She. They're at a party when she says this and she is not sober. And there is the question of is this, is she right or is this a rationalization that she has come up with to, you know, explain or, you know, let herself get away with her bad behavior? And I don't think that the, the book gives an easy answer to that. Like, I. I don't know. And I don't. I don't know. I think that there's. There's a tension there in that scene about whether Cora doesn't necessarily buy into it, but doesn't dismiss it out of hand either. So I would like to think that we can all be happy. I hope we can, but I don't know.

[Chris Holmes]

But there is it. I, I think what you touch upon there, that I don't think it's said aloud a lot is that the, the way of quantifying happiness seems to change so dramatically from, from that moment of getting an ice cream to thinking about waking up and getting the kids to school. Something, something profound happens in how we quantify happiness. Is that, is that more the question then?

[Erin Sommers]

I think so, yeah. That's a good way of putting it. What does make adults happy? You know, I find the things that make me happy are, are like really surprising to me these days. And they, they aren't the things I think, you know, what makes me really happy is like, it's really just like being with my kids when I thought it would be career achievement. You know, it's like it's none of the things that you think it's going to be. It's like some quiet thing that's like, over to the side is like, what, where happiness can be found. And it's not, you know, it's just like none of these, like conventional signifiers that we've been, you know, trained to want.

[Chris Holmes]

The subtitle of the 10 year affair should be be careful what you wish for. You really put flesh on the bones of Korra's imagined affair with Sam by drama dramatizing how fully we give ourselves over to fantasies of another life with another person. And you also make it clear that what is at stake when those fantasies cross the threshold into a physical reality. But you really do give us the emotional fullness of this very long affair of the fantasy mind. What did you want readers to think and feel about the realness of an imagined affair?

[Erin Sommers]

I wanted it to begin to feel like a real relationship in the imagined world. And that included the way a real relationship grows over familiar or loses its luster. And so that sort of played for laughs in the novel, which is like, why is she. She finds herself imagining these sort of like, deflating or depressing things at a certain point, where in the world of the fantasy, for instance, she gets an abortion. And the comedy of it is, why would she be having something fraught and, you know, and upsetting or difficult to deal with, happen to her and, you know, in her fantasy life? So it follows the rhythms of a real affair. And I wanted the reader mostly to laugh, but also to find poignance in the way she imagines it.

[Chris Holmes]

I mean, so there's this great line. Cora thinks relationships came of age and this was what was happening. It meant that they would have the full menu. Camaraderie, desire, indiscretion, pleasure, pain and loss, and they would discover the limits of their feelings for each other. We don't often get that full menu in depictions of fantasy. So can you say a little bit more like, why. Why did you want that full menu of emotional complexities to be so present in the. In the affair?

[Erin Sommers]

You found my favorite line. Ah, I guess that I was just thinking about. I'm a person that's hungry for life, and I think a lot of people are this way. And my hunger for life is that I want the whole. The whole picture. You know, I want the. I want every feeling. I want to know it all. And even. And that's going to include, you know, pain and loss. And so I g. I gave that hunger to Cora, and she's trying to live it out through the Affair, that the affair is a way for her to take emotional risks and to feel new things and to get this wider breadth of experience.

[Chris Holmes]

While it's not a Covid novel per se, the Ten Year Affair exists through the pandemic. And Covid puts a spotlight on just how closed our lives became and how desperate we were for socialization. Part of me thinks that in fiction and in our despoiled reality, Covid was merely an accelerant to our awareness of alienation and disconnection from others. That feels at the root of what Cora and Sam are going through. So how does Covid work here? Metaphor? Virus? Something in between?

[Erin Sommers]

I think that you're exactly right that it was an accelerant for alienation and isolation. And it caused many people to become lonely in new and terrible ways and shifted society enormously. And it happens about halfway through the novel, which isn't an accident. And it does sort of accelerate the Quora, turning more to Sam and becoming closer to Sam. So, yeah, I think that it is a metaphor, certainly It's a device, and I wanted to mimic the way that it. It caused a huge shift in many people and made many people's, you know, grasp of reality slip further.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, it. It certainly feels in. In retrospect, it feels more and more like that. It's impossible to talk any. About any of the pathos in this novel without understanding how each character engages with the inevitability of aging and even death. For in our first half of life or so, one proceeds with a sense that time stretches almost infinitely out in front of you. Everything is potential. At some point that changes. Our parents age before us and eventually die. And we become exquisitely aware of our mortality or even simply the visible. Visible aging of our bodies later in the novel. Cora thinks they had met in early parenthood and their older children were now preteens. Lines appeared around her eyes and on either side of her mouth. Time softened you, but it also made things more urgent. They would. They would really and truly die one day, Elliot had said. Cora and Sam sat on the bed and the years pressed down. So the urgency of age, how does it. I. I think that's a wonderful way of. Of putting it and feels so true, like, painfully, painfully true. How did you want the urgency of age to run through all these different kinds of relationships?

[Erin Sommers]

All these people are on the verge of turning 40 in the book, which is not old by any means, but it is maybe the age where you start to think about mortality and you do start to feel like the hourglass is running out. You know, you're in the second half of your life now, most likely. And I think that infidelity can be very related to a fear of mortality and a fear that your youth is. Is getting away from you or is behind you and that you don't have that much time left. And you can. You know, it can cause people to feel a little bit frantic and a little bit like they are not. They are not taking advantage. And they've got to squeeze every drop of living out of. Out of every moment, because they don't. It's not objectively that much time. And I. I wanted that to be felt throughout, especially in the second half of the book as they creep up on 40. I wanted there to be almost, you know, a feeling of. Of increased pressure and almost like a frenzied feeling around it. Like, we gotta. We gotta live our lives. You know, we. We gotta live our lives. We're gonna die.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah. And you absolutely feel that frenzy in it. I think you were very successful in it, and I'M not gonna spoil the ending, but it, it, it plays out that frenzy into, into, in some ways a very unexpected final climax. But, Aaron, before I let you go, I would love to know a little bit about what you've been reading and what you've been loving recently and if you have any recommendations for us.

[Erin Sommers]

Well, I recently read Flesh, the novel that's shortlisted for the Booker, and it is incredible. It's by David Slay. I don't know if I'm saying his last name correctly.

[Chris Holmes]

I don't know how to say it either, but I know what you're talking about.

[Erin Sommers]

It is wonderful. It's very intense, it's very surprising. It's about Guy who had, as a teenager was in a sexually abusive relationship with his neighbor across the hall who was an adult woman. And then after that incident plays out, you get the story of the rest of his life and it's never mentioned again. But you feel this incident, or these, the series of incidents bubbling beneath the whole thing in a way that's. And informing the whole thing in a way that's sort of miraculous. And I, I don't know how he pulled it off that he makes a. Makes you think about it without having to tell you to. And it is just unbelievably well executed. It blew me away. It's. It's a very sad book, but it is so impressive and so well done.

[Chris Holmes]

What was his book of short stories? That was like the best exploration of toxic masculinity I've ever. I've ever read. I can't remember the name of it.

[Erin Sommers]

But I know, I know what you're talking about. And, and I have read it, but I can't. I can't remember the title right now. Yes, he's extraordinary.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, this sounds so, so amazing.

[Erin Sommers]

It is amazing. And the other book I have loved recently was Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, which is an N Y R B book, but not a reissued one of their, you know, new releases. And she is from the uk and it's about a grandmother who has to raise her granddaughter because her daughter has substance use issues. And it's just about how fraught and fragile those family dynamics are. And I don't know if a novel has made me cry, like, not in many years with, like, tears rolling down my face.

[Chris Holmes]

Oh my gosh.

[Erin Sommers]

But it's also not just that. It's got such a light touch. It's funny. It's beautiful. That's the novel that I've been recommending to absolutely everyone in every corner of my life and they all text me like, that's the best book I've read this year. So I like gave it to my mom, I gave it to my sisters. I've like recommended it to four different friends and I just really think, like, it's so brilliant.

[Chris Holmes]

I, you're the second person to have recommended on the podcast, so I think. And, and your, your description just there means I need to buy it immediately. It's. And I'm going to get both of those books because they, they're both on my radar and they look great, but I, I want to just, I can't Recommend Enough. The 10 year affair by Aaron Summers. You just aren't going to read another book about infidelity that is really about everything in our messy, wonderful human lives and with such wit and humor. And while if you're, if you're new to Aaron Summers and you're in the bookstore, also buy stay up with Hugo with Hugo Best because the two of them are a wonderful pairing. And it was so great to get to talk to you, Aaron. This was such a delight.

[Erin Sommers]

Thank you so much, Chris. This was amazing.

[Chris Holmes]

Thank you. Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Erin Summers for coming on to talk about her latest hilarious novel, the Ten Year Affair. You can find links to purchase the Ten Year Affair and all of Aaron's recommended books at the website burnedbybooks.com there you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy, a podcast T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books. Sam.