Naked: Confessions of Adultery and Infidelity

Naked: Confessions of Adultery and Infidelity
Edited by Kylie Ladd and Leigh Langtree

ADULTERY and infidelity, you may be surprised to discover, are not the same thing. The former - as the editors of this collection point out - is the physical act of betrayal, whereas the latter denotes unfaithfulness to a moral obligation, the breaking of emotional trust between two people.

It's a distinction worth making, as this anonymous collection of confessions covers the full spectrum of betrayal: from inappropriate internet chatting to full-blown physical affairs drawn out over many years. Indeed, in one story a man claims to have fallen deeply in love with a woman whom he has never met, other than in an online environment: "All I can say about all of that is - believe me, even though we never did meet in person, it counts ... I was attracted, like a magnet, to a woman in a chat room."

Writers Kylie Ladd and Leigh Langtree spent a year compiling the confessions of the unfaithful and the deceived, their only stipulation being that the writers speak honestly about their experiences.

The respondents offered vastly different views on unfaithfulness - some logical and almost clinical in their analysis, others clearly disturbed by the turn of events. So varied are the contributors' emotional responses to infidelity that it seems the only common element uniting the stories, apart from the topic of unfaithfulness, is their revealing nature.

We hear from a man so distraught by his wife's transgressions, that she finds him in their bedroom with a shotgun on his lap. "You better get out of here," he says. In Trust Fund, the author's husband falls in love with a close friend of hers -albeit after she invites her into their bed - but instead of it sounding the death knell for their relationship, it signals a new understanding between them.

The author copes with her husband's betrayal by reassessing her expectations of him: "I go so far as to believe that imposing trust on another person is a crime against their autonomy," she writes. Another woman is not so understanding and her piece, entitled That Phone Call, seethes with a visceral brutality: "It was when he wasn't around that I went really mad. I'd scratch my arms, pull my hair, scream at myself in the mirror. Bad wife, I'd say."

And yet, despite the various reactions to the upending force of unfaithfulness, some common themes are apparent. Those who are doing the cheating all speak of the maddening influence of their affairs, how their conscious and unconscious drives seem to conflate, and the world of bills and washing and children's piano lessons recede dramatically.

Few escape the insane state of falling in love: one woman was stumped when her email refused to go through to her lover, only to discover she had already used up the maximum amount her web connection allows: 500 in a day.
Women, it seems, are also afflicted with their own, albeit slightly different, version of the Madonna-whore complex.

Time and time again, they speak of an exciting and slightly wild man entering their "beige" and safe lives, and offering them a much more colourful world.
There is always a risk that confessional compilations become little more than illicit catharsis; offering little in the way of genuine insight, but plenty in the way of voyeuristic thrills.

A person in love, it could be argued, is a bit of a bore and the reflections of those caught up in an affair are not worth very much, infected as they are by the clichés of "could have beens" and "if onlys". Naked, at times, skirts this territory, but is saved by the overall quality of the writing and the surprising level of honest, unclouded reflection.

The editors have chosen well and some of the contributors to Naked are clearly talented authors in their own right, helping to lift the collection of stories out of the cheap-thrills category.

(From the Sun Herald)