I am not sure how to begin this review of a book under 100 pages that has kept me thinking all day after I finished it.
I have always believed that when someone cheats on you, the next step is to confront them. Have a conversation. Ask why they did what they did. Whether you understand their reasons or not, one has to leave. But believing you should leave and being ready and able to leave aren’t always the same thing.
In this short story, we follow Carrie and David, two strangers who discover that their spouses are having an affair. An affair that has gone on for longer than they initially thought.
One day, Carrie finds letters from Janet, David’s wife, in her husband Ken’s car. Instead of confronting Ken about the affair, Carrie decides that writing a letter to David was a good idea; only when she doesn’t get a response from him does she start to question it.
‘Dear Mr David Mayer, I must apologise for my previous letter. I sent out that missive in a flush of emotion-and seeing as how I have not heard back from you-I fear I made the wrong decision.’
David initially struggles to believe that his wife would cheat on him. But when he finds letters from Ken, he does what Carrie did. He doesn’t confront his wife. He confides in Carrie about the betrayal by someone who means the world to him.
We learn about their lives through their letters. Sometimes, this makes it hard to know what is happening beyond what they choose to share in the letters.
There’s something such betrayal does to Carrie. She starts to feel less than. That she is not enough. That she is not worth her husband’s respect, love and consideration.
This betrayal comes alongside another struggle. She is a thirty-year-old woman in the 1970s who has been unable to have a child. She is made to believe that she has failed to give her husband something she owes him, and that the problem must lie with her.
‘The doctor can’t say for sure why I am not yet pregnant, but it seems clear that something is wrong with me. He even said it was likely pointless to test Ken. He said it most often lies with the woman. What more evidence do I need that I am deficient?’
When I think of things hypothetically, I often conclude that I would decide differently. Make better choices. But being in love can make those decisions harder than they appear from the outside. You may know that a relationship is making you miserable and still want to stay because you love the person.
Carrie and David continue comforting each other as they process their spouses’ betrayal. They both need someone to talk to. Someone who can listen and understand their dilemmas. But their relationship eventually becomes an affair too, making their choices harder to look at without questions.
Could they have chosen differently? Perhaps, yes. But they both have reasons for not being ready to confront their spouses or to leave.
Carrie doesn’t know any other life than the one she has with Ken.
‘I can’t imagine life without him. I wouldn’t even know where to start. I am afraid of losing all that I have ever known,’ she tells David in one of her letters.
And David? He has four children with Janet. The future he wants has his family intact. He wants to live under the same roof as his children. Say goodnight and good morning every day. Now he wonders whether that future is possible any more.
‘So I am going to continue to think about the good future for now until I know what I am going to do,’ he confides in Carrie.
This partly explains why people make the choices they do. Because life is not black and white. And the affairs of the heart are complex. The fear of starting again. The family they want to keep together. The hope that things might still work out. The bright colours make you hope that there will be more yellows if you hold on a little longer.
Evidence of the Affair explores what happens in the mind of someone being cheated on. The characters’ raw emotions make them relatable and easy to sympathise with. I also enjoyed the references connecting this story to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s other books.
Even so, I wanted Carrie and David to have those difficult conversations sooner. I kept wondering what might have changed if they had spoken to their spouses. A conversation might not have saved their marriages, but it could have helped them understand where they stood.