Secrets, Lies And The Allure Of The Illicit
About those affairs, Plump conveys the intoxicating combination of "appetite and impulse" behind her dalliances: "What I wanted most ... was the drug and energy of passion, of new intimacy." But she also describes the angst and guilt of fabricating alibis to explain her whereabouts while her husband traveled on business. She mines her own personal experiences to extract the universal, likening affairs to addiction, "half miserable, half bliss." Each time, she found the "unbearable mix of yearning and regret" unsustainable, and came clean of her own accord. Besides, despite her difficulty with monogamy, she believes in a commitment to marriage over the long haul: "I may have strayed. I would never have left."
Her husband's affairs, on the other hand, began later and impinged on the couple's child-rearing. Even after she found out, he refused to discuss them. Readers will question her determination to save the marriage given the severe disconnect she portrays — but perhaps that's just the clarity of hindsight. From their meeting in college, her husband was "an even flame to my reckless burn. He was not affectionate and he was not demonstrative. I am both, in spades," she writes. Of greater consequence was the fact that "right back to the beginning, there was never enough revelation in our relationship, never enough said."
When she discovered his first affair in 1994, with a stripper, she wondered if it was triggered by her earlier transgressions and forgave him readily. His 10-year relationship and out-of-wedlock son, which she learned about in 2005, were a different story. It was, she writes, "one of those affairs that shock the whole pond and change all the life forms in it. So that nothing could thrive there afterward."
After losing husband, house and even her sons half-time to joint custody, Plump ruefully acknowledges how much energy she expended on adultery. "Of all the things there are to do on the planet, my husband and I picked one hell of a pastime," she writes in this gutsy, intelligent examination of vows and the tantalizing allure of the illicit.
Read an excerpt of Vow