Erin Somers Interview | Sunny's Journal and Press | Sunny's Bookshop — *Photograph of Erin Somers by Nina Subin*

In The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers, the protagonist, Cora, meets Sam at a baby group and is immediately attracted to him. There’s just one problem: Cora and Sam are both married to other people. Cora is married to Eliot, a good guy who tends to get a little too stoned to want to have sex. Sam is married to Jules, a successful lawyer who has a tendency to look down upon Sam’s lack of career ambition. Despite the problems in their marriages, Cora and Sam both love their respective spouses – and the children that they have – so they make the decision not to go through with an affair. And this is where the book diverges into two timelines – one real and one imaginary.

In the real world, Cora and Sam push aside their feelings for one another and move forward as friends – they have frequent double dates, they don’t acknowledge when they look for reasons to be alone together, they stay away from crossing a physical line. In the imagined world, the one that exists only in Cora’s mine, they go through with the affair – they meet in hotels, they lie to their spouses, they live double lives. Both worlds exist simultaneously, deepening the complexity of Cora and Sam’s relationship with each other, as well as their marriages.

Somers – who is also the author of 2020’s Stay Up with Hugo Best – fills the world of The Ten Year Affair with complex characters who jump off the page and feel viscerally real. After spending these pages with Cora – as she navigates the ups and downs of her marriage and the pull of attraction to Sam – you’ll feel like you’ve spent years with a close friend. Somers is adept at making the mundane into a satisfying and engaging page turner; you’ll find it extremely difficult to put down The Ten Year Affair, especially as Cora and Sam continuously walk the line of friendship and more-than-friends.

Below is my discussion with Erin Somers about the process of writing two timelines, what draws readers to affair novels, turning a short short into a novel, and more.

Spoiler warning: The following discussion contains spoilers for The Ten Year Affair, so please proceed with caution.

The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers | Sunny's Journal and Press | Sunny's Bookshop

Nikki: I know that The Ten Year Affair started as a short story – how did you get the idea for the short story?

Erin: I’d had a baby, I was living in Brooklyn at the time. I was very lonely [while] on parental leave and, to fill the time, I went to a baby group much like the one in the book. It was Brooklyn so there were a lot of outlandish parenting strategies happening and I just thought this would be such a great setting or jumping off point for something down the road, but I didn’t quite know what the entry point was yet. So I put it in my pocket to come back to. And then eventually I synthesized it with the idea of two people in a small town having an affair. And it took off from there.

Nikki: So at one point did you know you wanted to turn it into a novel? And what was the process of that?

Erin: I thought that the short story wasn’t going to sell because it’s difficult to sell short stories no matter what. It just never gets easier for whatever reason, even as you ascend in your career. So while it was out in the world on submission, I just thought [it wouldn’t sell] because of natural pessimism but I really liked the world – this kooky baby group and the couple at the center of it. I thought there was a real spark there so I started to expand it to a novel. But in the meantime, the story did in fact sell and it had this nice little life. Then, it became [figuring out] how to expand the short story without losing the original spirit of it and the original texture of it.

Nikki: Do you think that the characters stayed pretty intact from the story to the novel? Or what were the adjustments, if any?

Erin: That’s interesting. I think they stayed mostly intact, but I realized as I started to expand it that I didn't know that much about them. You find out in the short story version, for instance, that Cora works a soulless office job but you don’t know what that job is. You don’t find out what Sam does for a living, you don’t know any details about the community really. It’s sketched. So I had to sit down and think about what all these things were. Where does she work? Where does Sam work? How do their work life and their ambitions figure into this story? What does their greater community look like? Who else is in their life? I had to go in and really build them out from scratch because there were just a few details sketched about each character. I especially had a lot of work to do with Cora because we’re in her head and it’s her voice narrating the novel. So I would say she stayed consistent but became a lot fuller and a lot more realistic.

Nikki: The relationship between Cora and Sam – or rather the two different versions of their relationship – are at the center of the novel, but both of their relationships with their spouses are also essential to the story. How did you find the right balance of good and bad elements in each of these marriages? Because it needs to be believable both that Cora and Sam would be unhappy enough to want an affair but happy enough to stay in these marriages. It seems like a really fine line to walk.

Erin: I was really determined not to have this be a book where the men were just villainous and sort of flat in that way. You sometimes see [that], where [the men] are just jerks and you’re like, why doesn’t she leave? So I had to make them likeable, especially the husband [Eliot] – he’s just this likeable stoner guy and he’s very sympathetic. I think that was crucial in letting the reader see that it’s not so easy. If he was just a jerk, she could easily leave, but it’s not that. It was important to me that the characters were just flawed, ordinary people. No one was purely good and no one was purely bad. Just people you might know who are out there making mistakes and muddling their way through.

Nikki: You’re right, it makes it so much more believable and nuanced. It increases the tension and the stakes as well.

Erin: Right, there’s the added stake of like, she could hurt this guy who is really not a bad guy and blow up her relationship with him, which is valuable. I thought that the more complicated I could make each person, the juicier it felt to me.

Nikki: I really just love the concept of there being two realities – one “real” and one “imaginary.” During the writing process, did you write those simultaneously or did you mostly focus on one and then switch to the other?

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Erin: I dealt with them simultaneously and it was hard to figure out. It took many drafts and many revisions to get a feel for how much there should be of each, what a good balance was, or when one should interrupt the other. One of my main concerns was [figuring out] the imagined world. It’s much lower stakes because the book is up front about the fact that it’s not really happening and that she’s imagining it. So I knew that it was lower stakes for a reader because it’s not really happening, so it matters less. So I didn't want to overstay my welcome in that world. So that world mostly ended up being a sounding board for her thoughts, her desires, it’s a place she can escape to. And then the real world is the timeline with more stakes.

Nikki: For much of the novel, Cora and Sam, in the real world, do not act on the affair. But they still share one kiss and are always looking for ways to spend time together. How did you figure out the parameters for how far they would or wouldn’t go?

Erin: I knew that they had to continuously walk up to the line or the line had to be pushed further and further as the years go on. There’s a pattern of them pushing it and then being like, ‘Oh no, we shouldn’t do that.” Then, they pull back a little bit or try some new tactic of negotiating their relationship where they see each other less or whatever. Then, finally, all of those tactics fall away and they go for it. Again, it was just a matter of revision and experimentation of withholding that tension – that will-they-won’t-they tension – and [figuring out] which things have to escalate to keep the tension mounting.

Nikki: So did you always know that they would actually go through with the affair? Or was there ever a possibility that they don’t go there?

Erin: I tried to have them not. Then, my agent was like, ‘The reader is going to be mad at you. You can’t tease it for 200 pages and then have it not pan out. That’s not fair.’ I thought about it and I think she was right – it’s unfair to sustain that amount of tension in a novel length work and not deliver on it in some way. I’m on the side of the reader. I want to reward the reader’s attention, so I took that note to heart and I changed my strategy. What was tricky about it was that something had to happen with the dual timeline conceit. And it took awhile for me to figure out what should happen – if they start having an affair, what happens to the second, imagined timeline? The fix for that came to me very slowly, it took months to crack. But I think the ultimate solution is pretty cool and people will like it, I hope.

Nikki: I loved where it went. And it’s so interesting to hear that process – I genuinely did not think that they were going to go there. I was prepared for it not to happen. So when it did, I was so surprised and it was even more satisfying.

Erin: I love to hear that, that’s exactly how I ultimately wanted it to be perceived.

Nikki: I’m curious – how much do you think Eliot knew about Cora’s attraction to Sam? Toward the end, there’s an indication that he knew about the actual affair but I’m curious about all of the years leading up to that, what he thought.

Erin: I think that he seems oblivious throughout but then, at the end, we learn that he was not as stupid the whole time as Cora thought. It’s a redeeming moment for him. He knew, he wasn’t so oblivious after all. So my conception of it is at a certain point he had a suspicion or an inkling. Or maybe he had an inkling throughout and something confirmed it for him at some point. But I wouldn't want to pin it to a specific thing he knew but I think that he, in his heart, probably observed something all along and maybe he hadn’t let himself see it.

Nikki: Yeah, I like that. My mind jumps to the scene where the two couples are having dinner and Sam announces that he and Cora went skinny dipping together.

Erin: Yeah totally, he is going through a lot in that moment, that’s when he’s grieving the death of his parents, but you can imagine him after the fact being like, ‘Wait a minute now.’

Nikki: What was your favorite scene to write?

Erin: I loved writing the party chapter, the guys’ 40th birthday party. It’s all set over the course of one day, which is technically challenging. I just loved writing it. I was like, this should be as fun as possible. The party should be these middle-aged people getting too lit – it was really fun coming up with the things that they were doing. I also got to put all the characters in one place – all the peripheral characters, all the friends from town that we’ve glimpsed. Everyone got to be in one place and interact with each other, so that was very gratifying.

Nikki: What do you think is so fascinating to readers about affairs?

Erin: It’s just juicy, right? On a fundamental level, it’s juicy. It feels like gossip from one town over – that’s how I wanted it to feel. Like, low stakes gossip about people you don’t necessarily know, but you’re invested. And then, because of the way affairs operate in a novel, being grounded in domestic spaces, they can be the engine of a class novel where you’re making all these class observations and lightly making fun of a narrow segment of people. So they’re great for that too. That combined with it’s just being fun to read about the minor intrigues of [people]. It’s like getting a glimpse of someone’s life through open curtains, there’s something sort of voyeuristic about it, a guilt free voyeurism.

Nikki: I agree, they’re just so fun. What are some of your favorite affair and/or marriage novels?

Erin: To prepare for writing this book, I read a lot of midcentury infidelity fiction written by the great writers, “the great male writers” of the 20th century. Rabbit, Run [by John Updike] was a big influence on the book. Also, Revolutionary Road [by Richard Yates] and some of the short fiction of John Cheever. All of that stuff is really great and I love it and it’s beautifully written. I wanted to borrow some tropes from them but I also wanted to subvert a lot of things about them. Like these narratives are very centered on men, for instance, and the women are rendered in such a way that they don’t necessarily feel real or rounded out, so I wanted to flip that [and make sure that] the most complicated and compelling people in the book are the women.

Nikki: I love that about the book. Were there any books you read that inspired you?

Erin: The work of Laurie Colwin, you should check her out. She has a series of really beautiful, hilarious domestic novels that are very focused on small details of people’s lives in a way that is very inviting and is very cozy. So there’s always [details of] what people are eating, what the rooms look like, what people are wearing, all these details that feel real and very alive and very comforting. So I wanted to project the same vibe and just make a little home for the reader.

Nikki: What are you working on next? Or what are some themes you’re excited about or would like to explore?

Erin: I'm working on a novel that is loosely related to this novel. [There’s a] scene in the book where they’re sitting around gossiping about swingers in town. The next book is about this group of swingers in this small town outside of New York City. It’s about the things that go wrong and how they blow up their lives. It’s been very fun. It’s the same sort of feeling of a juicy topic, of figuring out how I can make it as juicy as possible.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.