THE AFFAIR - Alicia Clifford
St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 978-0-312-37627-7
March 2012
General Fiction

England, 2010

When author Celia Bayley's husband died in January of 1990, her children feared for their mother's life in her apathy and despair, but a rare moth alighted on a small, old painting in the room where the family sat. Celia's seven-year-old granddaughter, Bud, exclaimed it was grandpa come back. Suddenly, Celia found a renewed vigor for living, and for the next twenty years before her own death, she wrote best-selling novels.

At seventeen Celia had married Frederick, a much older man, a soldier serving in World War II. It wasn't until two years later she found out she was his second wife. Afterwards, the deceased former wife colored Celia's world with jealousy, a sense of betrayal, and of being second best. To even her closest friends, though, her marriage looked perfect, and for the last twenty years of his life, she nursed Frederick after a catastrophic stroke left him bound to a wheelchair and unable to speak.

At Celia's funeral the media's interest in their famous mother astounds her children, Robert, Margaret, and Sarah. A young reporter shows up wanting to write Celia's biography, but her investigation into the mountains of letters, writing scraps, and diaries in Celia's study and the attic of the family home raises questions the family doesn't want to hear. These questions begin to paint a very different image of their mother's secret-filled life and marriage. Even as the family strives to protect their mother's and the family's images, change alters each of their lives in some dramatic way. They make a drastic decision that upsets Bud, and only she continues to search for the important truths in her grandmother's life.

The title THE AFFAIR sounds titillating, but in fact the story is about the ordinary affairs of life, friendship, marriage, and life more than a mere secret sexual encounter. Its rambling discourse follows Celia's life and those of her friends, Priscilla and Bet, her children, and her grandchildren. While Frederick plays an important role, he and all other men except Robert are only seen through the eyes of women. The characters are all very flawed, sometimes to the point of unlikable, and yet, as the story develops, they become just ordinary people trying to cope with the changing tides of life. In THE AFFAIR, author Alicia Clifford gives insight into how social classes perceive friendships, how family members see each other, and how well anyone can ever know or judge what drives another person. It is an introspective, quiet, and often sad story, but a powerful and moving testament well worth reading.

Robin Lee