As an elder millennial, Erin Somers has seen it all: the prosperous days of the “young urban creative”; the brief, sparkling reign of the girlboss; the inevitable crash that followed; and now… ennui. “We’ve become disillusioned with ambition, especially the women I know as they’re approaching middle age, so I wanted to explore that,” the author says of her latest, The Ten Year Affair.
The novel’s avatar for all this malaise is Cora, a young mom trying to balance her increasingly unsatisfying marketing job and the monotony of running her household. “There’s two paths for the modern woman: One is you’re all in on your career, and the other is you’re slotted into a traditional family role. [Cora] doesn’t fit into either of these groups,” says Somers. Instead, the one place Cora finds contentment is in an alternate timeline, where she’s having an imagined affair. “Freedom, as I conceptualize it, isn’t really to be found at either of the poles of career or family. The book is suggesting that the third path involves the inner life, the wild, unbridled stuff going on in your head, as opposed to external gratifications.”
Cora’s inner life is not only consumed by her own “affair,” but also musing about the sexual politics and relationship dynamics of the creative-class couples surrounding her in the Hudson Valley. (Which of the soft-masculine, craft-beer-drinking men feel too emasculated by their wives to have sex with them? Are there any other women who have mothered their partners to the point where they’ve become non-sexual objects? Cora wonders.) Interestingly, with the book now out in the world, Somers has found a surprising number of people now want to gossip about these topics with her. “[The novel] gives them license to open up to me about their sex stuff. They tell me that they cheated, or they want to tell me about their friend situation,” Somers says. “It hasn’t gotten old — yet.”
On her unexpected recent reads:
I’m always reading very random stuff for something I’m writing, like Salman Rushdie’s book [Quichotte] that riffs on Don Quixote and Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson. Both of them are very enjoyable — but when people ask me [what I’m reading], they think it will be some contemporary fiction. It’s never exactly the response that people are expecting.
On procrastinating with menial tasks:
I have a record player in my office, and I listen to instrumental records. It’s so nice, because you have to stand up every so often to flip the record. I like the busywork.
On writing slightly tipsy:
If I’m doing a long writing day, I will have precisely one beer at the end. Then with snacks, I really have an apple a day. I can’t eat starchy junk food a lot, so I’m into hummus, pita, raw vegetables, basic fruit.
On reading the entire Internet:
I’m back on Twitter after a long time off because I’m promoting the book. It’s a wasteland. It’s an exodus, and it’s bots talking to each other. But it’s still how I find a link to a buzzy book that I might be interested in, and I’ll click on it. There’s so little to read now compared to what there used to be that I am typing “bustle.com” or “vulture.com” into my browser and just reading everything.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
