Erin Somers's The Ten Year Affair: a comic take on millennial midlife longing

Erin Somers's novel The Ten Year Affair follows Cora, a millennial mother who, in 2015, longs for a bygone kind of passion but spends 10 years fantasising about and discussing an affair rather than having it. The book frames itself as a comic send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers.

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have moved reluctantly upstate, with desk jobs, two children and a persistent mushroom under the bathroom tiles they lack the energy and money to sort out. Her would-be lover, Sam, is a playgroup dad who is described as "chief storytelling officer" at a mortgage start-up.

Cora imagines alternate lives of sex and hotels, wanting to be "worshipped like someone’s teenage wife," yet she is as rigid as Eliot and incapable of the abandon she wants. When they finally give in, the sex is described as sad and anticlimactic rather than the sepia romance she dreamed: Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam "stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room" before dinner.

Somers also shows how parenthood has dulled the characters' pleasures, even awkwarding their conversation with their daughter about sex until Eliot lands on, "you know genitals?" The novel raises middle‑age questions about meaning and joy but, the reviewer notes, Somers does not grant Cora false epiphanies.

Key Topics

Culture, Erin Somers, Cora, Sam, Eliot, Brooklyn