Kate Taylor on infidelity, trashy novels and Charles Dickens

Journalist Kate Taylor's latest novel, Serial Monogamy, opens with a husband confessing an affair to his wife. Sharon, is trying to deal with her husband's infidelity when she gets a cancer diagnosis. She takes up a writing project to distract herself, a serialized novel about Charles Dickens and his teenaged mistress. The novel alternates between the two time periods, with both storylines asking questions about marriage, monogamy and long-term relationships.

Kate Taylor spoke to Shelagh Rogers about Serial Monogamy and whether marriages can survive a clash of egos.

The fidelity trap

I think that maybe we've put ourselves in a bit of a trap, in that we hold out monogamy as the goal and the ideal, but then we find it very hard to live up to. We're caught in the situation where we're maybe not being honest with ourselves about what we're capable of. We also have a lot of shame about infidelity — there's such anger, trauma and pain around the subject of infidelity and marriage. As I've talked about the novel, I've started to think that it might be a bit like miscarriage as a subject, in that it's something that many women experience but that is not spoken about socially. So there's this hurt underneath the surface that people aren't dealing with.

Big egos and low-market novels

Sharon's husband, Al, is an expert on Charles Dickens. He's a professor and an expert, and he has a lot of ego involved in having adoring young students at his feet. Sharon was once one of his adoring young students, and now she isn't anymore. And one real source of tension in their relationship is her great success as a popular novelist — she describes her novels as the kind that feature a gauzy picture of a woman's face on the cover. So she knows her work is considered low-market by the standards of her professor husband and his colleagues, and yet she's making more money than him. My sense is that they both have really big egos, and that his nose is kind of out of joint and she doesn't really know how to deal with that, because the writing is important to her.

The famous Charles Dickens and the young Nelly Ternan

Charles Dickens' mistress, Nelly Ternan, was a young actress when Dickens met her. She retired and disappeared quite early in her career, presumably because Dickens took her off the stage and set her up in a house. Until about the 1930s, there wasn't honest recognition that he'd had this affair. There was knowledge that he had separated from his wife Catherine in the 1850s and it had been a bitter and ugly separation, but the reasons for it were never public. I thought a lot about what it would have been like to be an 18-year-old woman, just starting out in life, and having this 45-year-old man, a phenomenal celebrity, fall in love with her and attempt to seduce her.

Kate Taylor's comments have been edited and condensed.