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What I've Learnt - Kate Legge · WHAT I'VE LEARNT

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, three decades into her marriage, journalist Kate Legg discovered that her husband, the Maserati driving media executive Greg Highwood, was cheating on her.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if that was bad, it gets worse.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Highwood, for many years, chief executive of Fairfax, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and now the chairman of Free TV, admitted when confronted that he had been cheating on and off with different women pretty much since the wedding, it was pretty challenging for Kate, a very well-respected and renowned journalist herself.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, one of the mistresses was one of Leggy's close friends, a fellow parent at her son's school.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: She only found out because the other woman's husband was threatening to blow the whistle.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Leggy at 66 is a vivacious and attractive writer who for many years worked at the Weekend Australian magazine and has now published a book about her experience.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Infidelity and Other Affairs by James and Hudson, and it is not fiction.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: As she says, it was intensely painful, but even as I was going through it, I wondered if I'd one day write about it.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, she certainly has.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: The book is about Highwood's infidelity and how mortified and shamefilled and bonkers his adultery made his wife feel.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Author Trent Dalton praises it as a saddening but wonderful and honest as fuck book.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Love the chapters and have actually found this book quite moving, quite grueling, quite confronting, but also with a lot of optimism and hope.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_01: She's found a way to navigate what is really quite a challenging chapter of her life.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I am so thrilled to have the wonderful Kate Lake join me on the What I've Learned podcast because she's somebody I've always admired as a journalist and somebody who's had the most extraordinary career, which to me is really what defines her journey.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: However, this book is, you know, a quite a riveting, gut-wrenching, raw look at a very private experience.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: So, Kate, welcome to the What I've Learned podcast.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, Deborah, nice to be here.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: So tell me how you found the courage to write in such a raw fashion about such a private matter, because I think the resonance is just so powerful, both historically, the way that you talk about not only your husband's history, but about the history of women and men, but focusing on women who have been really betrayed and their trust abused.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: So this took a lot of guts, but I can see that you've taken both a private approach but also a scientific research approach.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me how you came to decide about how you were going to write this book.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was it was difficult because initially I thought about a fictional treatment, because of course it's much easier to delve into these very private personal emotions in the imaginative realm.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And as I was going through this, because it was 13 years ago when I first discovered the infidelities, I that was my first therapeutic writer's reflex.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I just I started taking notes and I approached my then literary agent for advice on what to do, and she was discouraged me strongly.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: She said, do not write about this now.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I put it aside and got on with life trying to rescue the marriage, and I wrote another novel and I kept on working, and of course, the work was an enormous source of distraction for me.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And then after the second lot of infidelities and after we'd tried to hold ourselves together and had failed, I hadn't actually decided to write about it then.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was only when I discovered our son's relationship had broken down through infidelity, and then it came across this research which suggested that it can be passed from one generation to the next that I decided to write about it.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Still with the idea of doing a fictional treatment of it.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: But as I went into lockdown and I started looking at it more deeply, I felt that it I wanted to have the authenticity of the personal approach.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to use that to delve into this universal issue.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I decided to change tack.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember telling my husband when he came to visit one day that I was thinking of doing this, and then there was this very, very long, awkward pause.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because of course he would he would have preferred that it had stayed in the imaginative realm.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: But I said, just let me let me see if I can do this.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I would never have published it without the support of everyone in my family, because the first third of the book, which deals with my husband's family, it was very important to get that um support and um endorsement of the people who are not named, but their stories are in there.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Just to clarify, your husband being, when you refer to your husband, you mean your husband.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he is still my husband.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I wanted to clarify.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: You haven't got divorced.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: So when you say that, I'm really interested.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Technicality.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Just clarifying.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: We both have separate relationships, but we we just haven't got tied that, untied that knot yet.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: That little bit of thing.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Which is really interesting.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, I'm sure it probably will probably happen one day, but just hasn't happened yet.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Very important in the writing of it, really, as a journalist, you'll understand this, because I, knowing everyone was going to read it, held my pen to the fire and I think made it a story that took account, deeply took account of other people's perspectives in this story.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because as we know, there's never just one version, there's my version, your version, and somewhere in between lies that sort of blurry grey area of truth.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, as a journalist, I towards the end of my career, I used to often show my subjects a magazine story that I'd written because I wanted them to be comfortable with it.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I also felt that it made me more honest as a journalist because I didn't let myself run away with my own exaggerations or interpretations of what was happening.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was very important.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that's interesting because what I, well, first of all, the notion of hereditary infidelity is fascinating anyway, to let you explore going back into your husband's history and his father and the family, which I found really interesting.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then obviously your son having also had his own exploration in that field as well.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: But I think also in some ways, what I've what I'm gathering is you used the best tools in your toolkit, which were your which was your capacity to scientifically in a way deal with something extremely painful and emotional, but to make sure that you used your framework.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that do you think that framework helped buffer you a little bit, or did you still find it just as raw?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or did it give you sort of, you know what I mean, like the the um the platform on which architecture.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the architecture.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Without hanging it completely off your own feelings.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the other point about waiting, which I feel is really important, is that it that that leaches the a lot of the raw emotion out of what you're talking about.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think the distance that the shifting perspective that time allows is is really important.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I I often use the metaphor when I walk in the morning, I'll go through this park and I go always go clockwise.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And recently I went counterclockwise for the first time, and it's like you see a completely different landscape.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what um you know the panorama of distance allows.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if you compare it, for example, to Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, you know, you know, he's written it in the raw moment of this extraordinary family conflict.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I wonder what his story would be in 15 years' time when some of that, you know, muddy water has clarified.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I felt the distance gave me.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: It it tempered it and tamped down some of the sort of you know, uglier, raw emotions that you feel when you're in the heat of it, and it brings it brings more light than heat.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And going back to your point about the tools in the in your toolkit, it's also that capacity, as you know yourself, to put yourself in another person's shoes, which is what journalism does.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it gives us this enormous privilege.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: We tour people's lives, we tease out often really painful stories, and we often go to other sources, other observers in that story, you know, to flesh it out, to put sinew and muscle tone on the bones of whatever we're we're carrying.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that that all of those things helped me tell this story.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: The other point is that I was dealing, and this is why I decided to cross the train tracks from fiction to non-fiction, was I wrote this book in lockdown when I decided to go through my father's personal papers that have been sitting in my garage for about seven years.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that started me on a journey of looking at the curses in my own family.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that was the, you know, when you talk about the scathology, it gave me another bit of architecture to look at at the curses and the seams of temperament and circumstance and genetic traits that run through families.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: So on the one side, we've got the infidelity that goes from my father's grandmother to his father, to himself, and to our son.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then on my side of the family, we have this river of mental illness and depression running through many generations.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I was really interested in unplatting those strands to discover more about myself and the mystery of becoming who we are.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: I just found it, I have to say, brilliant.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: And both of those strands you refer to were very potent.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: And you, I think you did it really effectively because I've actually read it a few times because I go back and go that.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just want to read one of the paragraphs, just interestingly.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've got a few that I obviously control myself, going, Oh, this is great.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: I've got to use this because there were so many little gems and very potent um pieces in there that really resonated.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: I loved this.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: This you wrote, My heart was broken.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: I felt gaslighted and idiotic and completely mortified.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Sylvia Plath dispatched herself after Hughes left her.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: She taped up her kitchen, turned on the gas, and laid her head on a folded cloth atop the oven door.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: Weevil had a daughter with Hughes and later gassed herself and their offspring.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: Catherine Graham's husband shot himself, Margaret J's husband, etc., etc.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it goes on to talk about all of these very intelligent, incredibly um revered people who really were gutted by the betrayal of trust.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: But then you also talk about, and I'll continue this a little bit, and this isn't a separate part of the book, but just contextualizing.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that's sort of a historical reflection on how many people are impacted and how common it is.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Our elders was about, this is you and your story, our elders was about to embark on his final year of school.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: I would not be party to sabotaging his prospects.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: First you staunch the bleeding, then you falter forward as though you've always got around with stumps where your legs used to be.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Shrapnel pinged my consciousness.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Moments were re-examined in a molten light, their weight shifted.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: I kept returning to a recent conversation with the Countess, who is one of the people that her husband had had an affair with for our listeners, at the kitchen bench of a holiday house we'd rented along the Great Ocean Road.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Our husbands were at work in the city, and it goes on to talk about just the fundamental need for you as a woman, as a mother, even as a wife, to continue, even if it meant you were like traumatized walking around what felt like on stumps, and just the extremity.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: So you talk about while the tools help you with the scaffolding and the architecture, the emotion of your book is raw, guttural, visceral.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: So to your credit, you didn't just hide behind the framework.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: You went right in there and you exposed it and also showed the historical context.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Was that hard?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm thinking, God, we can all relate to that.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: You'd want to protect your family, your son, your kids, whatever it is.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I for 40 years I'd been a journalist asking others to um unburden their soul.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And in that spirit, I guess I felt it was beholden on me to bear mine and to be as honest as I could, because that's what I've asked again and again of other people.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: I also find the most powerful writing is that which is not curated for appearance's sake.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew I it's authentic, and um, you know, it is the most revealing, that is often the most helpful for other people because that's why we write.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: We write in order to make sense of what's happened to us and to share it in the hope that others might be able to learn from the experiences we've gone through.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was important to be as honest as I could, and I think that honesty was magnified in the solitude of lockdown because I wasn't involved in any social engagement.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was really just me unpeeling, stripping off these layers, burying myself in my in my study where I write and getting to the bottom of things.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I had the time and I had the silence and I had the isolation and the solitude to do that.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And um, yeah that was my aim, and that is what I tried to do, and knowing that it really wouldn't be helpful to anyone if it was a half-assed, half-baked job, that it really had to get to the to the bottom of things.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I I'd like to, if I could, just to recite to you the last verse of this W.B.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yates poem, The Circus Animal's Desertion.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm hoping in my own small way I can do for this poem what um Four Weddings and a Funeral did for Auden's funeral blues.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And it gets to the bottom of where I was going and where I wanted to dwell.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the and the poem was written late in his life when he's losing perhaps some of um his proficiency and he's looking for what were the sources for his muse.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, um, uh, these masterful images, because complete, grew in pure mind.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: But out of what began?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, old bottles, old kettles, and a broken can, old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slush who keeps the till.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, in the foul, rag and bone shop of the heart.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I wanted to dwell.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: In the foul well, that's that's such a visceral image, isn't it?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: The foul rag and bone shop of the heart, because that's where our memories, our resentments, you know, all of the sort of purple, sometimes twisted emotions lie.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's, you know, it's it's it's often a dark place.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I do find the darker side of love and caring as fascinating as the joy and wonder of, you know, apple pie.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: I am with you.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, we all love the sunniness, but boy, it's so interesting when when it's dark and when it's yeah, and I think that is it tends to be a writer or an artist.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I resonate that very much.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe that's why your book was so, I mean, particularly that image when you talk about that, you know, you were in the news, you were in the newsroom, you went into the bathroom and you saw in the fluorescent light that you had physically attacked yourself, you know, quite physically to the point where there were bruises, purple and blue bruises, all over your body or all over the top of your chest.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, it nearly made me, you know, cry.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was very powerful image because I think as every woman or every person who who it's it's sort of like the worst thing you think could happen, or one of the worst things happened, you had to deal with it.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: You had to find a way through it.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: But also your bravery in the way that you talk about your vulnerability is really impressive because that takes a lot of courage.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: And as you talk about now, you're telling us how you wrote this very reasonably isolated.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that was in a way how you spoke so how you managed to be so raw?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, when I I got when when I I sort of was was thinking about you know the approach I was going to take, I it was like a fishbone dislodging from my throat in a way.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I uh yeah, I wasn't thinking about the consequences.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, obviously I would never have published it if it hadn't been supported by my family, but I wasn't thinking of the consequences when I was writing it.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh, you know, my husband says that he could actually see me healing as I was going through the process.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's you know, it's the putting one word in front of another, trying to make sense of it, that um you know is worth makes the journey worth its while.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the thing when you talk about what have I learnt from this.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: I guess I've learnt that you know, the beauty of acceptance and forgiveness, you know, you that you you can if you can get there eventually, it is so much better and healthier than acrimony, vengeance, suspicion, which it which are all the first emotions that come from betrayal and a breach of trust.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a it's a very difficult thing to work through in a relationship, and we weren't able to overcome it, although we had subsequently become very good friends.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: But that was just toxic.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And when you described that that I'd actually physically abuse myself at the time, you know, grief scores us in strange ways.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you do learn through journalism, you touched on something before, you know, damage begets damage begets damage.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: The Sylvia Plath, the Weevil, the you know, Margaret J's, Catherine Graham's husband shooting himself.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the damage that these things can unleash.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the the violence I did to myself, I talk about experiencing an eye murderous enough for me to understand how vi how treachery and betrayal can unleash terrible physical violence.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it does, you know, we read about it, don't we?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the new.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: We do.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I think that to your point also, there is, you know, I suppose there's a side of everybody that pushed pushed hard enough, the madness comes out.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't think, you mean you obviously refer to some sort of predisposition, mental health, you know, uh hereditary aspect, all of which is in probably most people I know.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, everyone's but what I do think is the triggering of that very visceral response to yourself, you know, it both punitive, both trying to just feel alive through such a trauma.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: I imagine it's like it felt like a war zone, I would imagine.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that sort of sense of absolute trauma, particularly, you do even refer to things almost as if it is a war zone.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: So the fact that that became then that writing this book then became a catharsis where you is very brave and very scary to do and to go deeper, dark as you have.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: But it sounds like you have learned and you have come on that journey, which doesn't happen for everyone.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that you've got a friendship now is quite extraordinary to me because we're talking 30 years of marriage.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're not talking three, 30 years of trust.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: You actually talk about it beautifully, you know, shared everything, really.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: You share everything, your discussions, your late night, you know, chatting in bed, your intimacies, your holidays, your children, all of the things that you share, and how that has so much weight in this story.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: How do you control the extraordinary?
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's all real.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that was real.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, your relationship has a lot of good stuff to it.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: And what you're saying is it's not bad person, good person, victim.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's what that took from it.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's and I learned along the way from Esther Perrell, who's a really um great therapist.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And she talks about that exactly as you're saying.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_00: There's no victim or perpetrator in this.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's what one did to one and what it meant to the other.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And she describes it, you know, uh someone once said to me who lost their daughter and their husband, they said, grief can either destroy you or enrich you.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it's true, it can.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that you could even say success can destroy you or enrich you.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's how you respond to the challenges you face in life.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it is so much better if you can use it to grow rather than to shut down and die and become gangrenous in your emotions.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I guess that's what that's what I've tried to do in this book.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think you've certainly achieved that.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought I think the other thing that emerges from this, and you do reference, as I said, history, but the universality of the experience.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that, you know, that's really like I'm sitting there going, wow, I have heard this story in different ways.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: It from so many people, you know, people I've interviewed, or stories I've read, or friends I've known.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, not the exact story, but the concept of betrayal.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's usually, you know, it's swept under the carpet, usually, isn't it?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because I mean, the fairs in particular, and even mental illness to some extent, they're shameful and they're often, you know, that's still how we regard it, unfortunately.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it's there's a sort of cloak of secrecy that damps down any revelatory or really meaningful discussions about this.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I wanted to do very much.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this is the last taboo around um infidelity, really, because it does, it thrives on being hidden.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if there's any way of uh, I mean, you know, you're never going to stop it happening, ever, no matter what.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's happened forever.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's always happened.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Happen forever, exactly, and it always will.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: But if you can give some people who are reading this maybe some tools when they're entering their relationships for how to deal with it.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, honesty obviously is just is such a gift.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, will people be honest?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: I doubt it.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: But that's again, one of the other therapists who was really helpful to me was Dan Savage, who's gay, married, and monogamy.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: But he says, you know, we promise not to stray, but sometimes we do.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if we do, it shouldn't necessarily be the end of everything.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: So take the good that you can you can distill from the relationship and grasp onto that.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess that's that's what we've tried to do as well.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: Just I just on that note, that's interesting too.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like you talk about when you first confront your husband.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember you, you know, you say, okay, I'm aware that you've you know been with a woman who was obviously a friend who was a school mom, you know, the countess, in itself, the image is just so potent for me.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: I can just imagine as I'm reading it, you know, what it must have been like.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that was the worst one of the worst things.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like her betrayal as well.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's one thing, you know, you had sort of two to deal with at the same time.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, how you sat around sort of at a holiday house together, all chatting about, you know, how you'd never stray because you were honourable and you you don't think it's worth it.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: And she just skulks off and has a sort of a little deep breath in the, I don't know, bathroom or whatever and comes back.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the whole thing is very I'm just sitting there going, you know, that's that's a doozy, that one image of adding issue all of its own.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that thing of is it worse if it's a stranger or if it's worse if it's a friend?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, obviously it's worse if it's a friend.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel some people have sort of accused me of double standards because I was sort of angrier or more upset by her than I was about my husband.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: But that's because I felt he had he had a log of claims, he had grievances which were fair enough, but I felt that I hadn't done anything to warrant that sort of um betrayal from a from a girlfriend.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I've forgiven her, I want to say that I've forgiven her absolutely, even though we don't speak to each other anymore.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, I I I've sort of understood now everyone's position in this drama and tried to come to terms with it.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, it's was hard stuff.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, well, two things.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, when you talk about, uh and this also nearly made me cry when I read this bit about how you know you tried everything, you went and got your brows waxed, you, you know, your your your laundry, you know, the Brazilian.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was half laughing, half crying, going, you know, like you're going, oh, and you know, I thought, oh, I, you know, and I'll I'll dress up and I'll do whatever, you know, like I'll do what I need to, and maybe that will just fix everything because obviously I, you know, that wasn't my focus and whatever.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought that was really powerful because, you know, to be honest, some of it is like, why has so much of the onus of this resolution come to you?
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's very much a you know, the role is suddenly, I'll work it out, I'll understand it, I'll fix it, I'll go, I'll go on the journey of understanding.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's healed you.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: It probably obviously your husband has supported that journey well as he should, in my opinion.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the interesting thing is so much of it is about the onus of the person that is, you know, you've had to look at your own behavior, the way that had you been in any way responsible, inverted commas, all of that I thought was also interesting because in a sense, we often do that.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: We often go, well, wait, like someone crashed into my car.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: What did I do?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: Was I not looking?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's like what I do.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: Must be my fault.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I actually talking to you, I'm thinking aloud here.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just wondering, because in my family, I was the middle child, which is always a sort of the peacemaking role, and particularly because of the nature of my crazy family, you know, and because I had uh an intellectually disabled brother who was just like a bomb going off in our house every day.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that was probably a role I fall into too easily, and also goes to the journalism background, and and so you're naturally more sympathetic to thinking it's my fault.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's my first position is oh my I must have done something, or what did I do wrong?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, I think, as you said, it's actually a ladder out of, you know, it's the ladder that if you take, it benefits you your approach, your understanding, gives you some hand railings to hold on and support yourself as you're moving forward without necessarily being aggressive, blaming, and again, you know, getting back into that um defensive crouch.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's a sort of you have an act of agency if you're trying to sort your way through these things.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think get to that place of acceptance, you know, because it is so important in every way.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: In the end, I feel I do feel you know much healthier and a little bit wiser, although I can't tell you I'm 65, almost 66 this year, and I am still making mistakes and learning from them.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess I never I'll always be in that.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: But you know what?
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: That that's that's exactly right.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, that's very much what this podcast is about.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: I have 80-year-olds, 85-year-olds come on, they're still learning because that's the human condition.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's the other thing, is it couches what your experience, the book and your story, couches it in a human condition, as I mentioned, universal capsule, so that you sort of have this sense that while it feels like the most personal, painful, powerful thing, it's actually got a context, and we're all just human in vertical.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: So none of us are perfect, and let's just work it out.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: And to your credit, you've taken an extra, I'm not saying it was easy, and I can imagine it's still not easy at times.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: There might be times where it flares, you know.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, and it does from time to time.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: We've just we've just um cleaned out 30 our house, 30 years of stuff, you know, absolutely gigantic job.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And um I I I was cleaning through my folders and I found a file relating to the infidelity that I've a screwed up letter that I'd written to the countess but never sent, you know, the the phone records that her husband had given me, the emails that I discovered on the computer, and you know, I had a a moment of sort of you know, a triggering moment, and then I just put put them away and forgot about them.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: But so it, you know, it is there underlying still, and occasionally, you know, I can feel still fear of flicker of anger about it, but I I really I'm so far from that now.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's a yeah, I can see that glorious spot to be in, you know.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you wish you'd set the letter or are you glad you didn't send the letter to her?
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh no, I'm glad I didn't send the letter.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think I took a lot of, I learned a lot from my mother-in-law who'd had a uh, you know, divorce, and her husband left her and actually set up house with the other woman.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: And she was so dignified and so graceful in her management of it.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: I really and so happy.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: She she went on and lived on her own for 30 or 40 years.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, I'm on my own.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: I have a relationship, but we don't live together.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it's she was such a great role model for me that it you feel so much better about yourself if you can if you can lift yourself up and and be above and be the best self you can in this situation rather than stooping to revenge.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: I never confronted the other woman.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't, did I?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: No, I never actually sent her a letter.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: She sent me a very um small letter, which I felt I shredded it because I just didn't.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was like someone thanking you or not thanking you for a dinner party, you know.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was tokenistic, yeah.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: So much bigger than all of that, but it was just best to leave it and get on with life at that point in time.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's so ironic to me.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: Is that not ironic to you that your mother-in-law, the mother of your husband, is is is the dignified mentor who takes you and helps you through.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that that is pretty amazing?
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was funny because I went to her in the heat of the in the heat of the discovering the infidelities, landed on her doorstep, expecting her to excommunicate her son.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: And she didn't.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it was, and and when I was in the position, you know, years later with our own son, I I understood more about her stoicism then and her perspective.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I think that um has helped me um provide a sort of middle space for my son and um the mother of his child, because they're no longer together, to find a new rules of engagement.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I couldn't, you know, I know that she wanted me initially just to strip him apart limb by limb, you know, excise him from the family, but I was, and I understood now why my mother-in-law hadn't done that, because by then I knew much more about everybody's point of view, and you know, it it wasn't going to help anybody to pour petrol on that fire.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: In a sense, I had to look after them both and provide love and support and be there for them and let time and you know, a little bit of insight begin to make itself felt.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: And do you think that when your son, you know, when this happened with your son and his former wife, did you do you feel you were better equipped from what you're just saying then?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: You feel that you were somewhat equipped to deal with it?
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because I remember you know, that you talk about getting the call at 3 a.m., you're somewhere and you get this call and you can't believe that it's your your daughter-in-law's called you distraught because they've just had a baby, haven't they?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: They've got a six-month-old or something.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and she calls you understandably distraught because your son has betrayed her.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: And her mother was out of the country.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: That was the other thing.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to be the one who flew down there just to take care of the of the house to make sure dinner meals were cooked, washing was done, all that sort of thing.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, the house filled with wailing friends and and relatives, of course, who shared her grief as I did too.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I had, you're absolutely right, I'd I had moved on from that moment, that horrible moment that Helen Garner likens to a blow from a baseball bat, that moment of implosion.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, in that moment, you can't understand anything but your own grief.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was just as I punched myself.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, she luckily didn't do that, but um, you know, that's what you feel, you know, the the the being up-ended, the sense of, I liken it to these, the footage I once saw of guests at an Israeli wedding who are dancing on the third floor of a hotel when the floor suddenly collapses under them and they go from jiving and laughing to this.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: To the bomb, yeah, harrowing screams and dust and bubble.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how you feel.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you do for such a period too, because you then have to reconcile what you thought you knew of the past with what you now know to be true.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's where you have this discombobulation for a period of time as you go through this new reality, this new world order, and come to terms with it.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: And and I had to tell my well, the mother of my grandson, I had, and I still talk to her about that, that it's time, time, time, time, just a day at a time, getting, you know, moving forward.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I I have to say that um, you know, we've had it, we've had a terrible family tragedy in our family in the last month.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I want to well, I I don't want to go into the details, but you know, all I want to say is that the grief of losing a husband is a picnic besides the grief of losing a child.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: And and and so I think, you know, I feel in a way, because that's happened, and I'm not allowed to go into it because it's of course my story to tell, but it's made me realise that, you know, yes, this is this is there are there is grief, and there is grief, of course.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, I suppose it is all relative, um, but there are much worse things that can happen in life than being betrayed by a um a husband and um and losing a husband in a marriage.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that's just and I, you know, that's just I think that's a really important no, and I uh to be honest, I have somebody very, very close to me who lost her daughter recently um in a very tragic way.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, once again, I won't go into the detail either, but very tragic.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I hear you, and I'm I'm watching her healing and working very hard to come through that tunnel.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: As I'm sure and I'm sorry to hear your family's going through.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's right.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're sorry to hear about that.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's probably something that we don't, and I know I read you correctly, it's probably uh that's another area that doesn't get talked about enough, you know, and it happens.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: 100% every much more common than we, you know, than we and and and so to your credit, you have touched a taboo here that that is very challenging.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Whether there will be ever an ex you know a discussion around some of these other issues you and I talk about, I don't know because it is so beyond it's sort of beyond human comprehension.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: It is beyond human comprehension now, and actually, you know, beyond almost beyond tears, you know.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's such a good expression.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's true.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: When I first heard this news, I actually couldn't even cry.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: I was just so dumbfounded and and struck by what I couldn't.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: But um, you know, that all you can do in these circumstances, and it's all I say to people when they're in the infidelity situation, if you've got a friend who's going through this, you can't tell them what to do.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: They've got to make the decision, you know, really, unless they're being physically or emotionally abused, you know, you really can't tell them to leave to get out unless that you need to save them and protect them.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's a different issue.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: Make a decision about whether they stay in a marriage that's just unhappy.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to let them come to terms with it themselves.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: All you can do is do what we where probably you and I are doing in this relative situation is to provide them with love and support.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you put your own.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's all you can do and just be there.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: But interestingly, you know, uh just just on the coming back to your story, love is a many fickled thing, splendid, but fickled, right?
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I always think that.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I don't know anyone who has just had the splendid part, right?
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's a complex thing.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: So if you couch, as I think you try and do in the book, if you couch it in the context of, you know, love's expectations, marital expectations, all of that, complexities from different families and ways of living and ways of coping, that's been a really interesting dynamic that you also talk to and express about, you know, it's not just a straightforward thing.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: Is that something that you would also with your girlfriends or or or friends who either have gone through it or going through it, or people who may go through it?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is that something that you have found comfort from or that you've, I suppose, excised that you've sort of gone, wow, actually, the of course this is complex because it is complex.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we get so little guidance.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's the other thing.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: I certainly got no, and that's one of the interesting things going back over the over these four generations, because you know, we we the book spans a hundred years in Australian life.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: It goes from the remote Broken Hill, the outback, you know, sandhill country of of western New South Wales to the suburbs of Melbourne.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: Melbourne.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: I love the way you've done it in suburbs, by the way.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: I love the way you've done that.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: It the chapters are actually, you know, Broken Hill, Mulvern, I think.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: I I found that quite actually picturesque.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was quite good.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: And you look at the and you look at the role of women and the role of, you know, they, you know, two in the first two stories, neither women had any education about sex, about getting, you know, reproduction, about periods.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: They had no idea.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so, of course, they had no idea about the finer sensibilities of love and and and marriages.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they didn't even have the tin tacks of of what happens if you if if you know if you have sex.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think we're very, we're still not good if indeed we know the art of passing on, you know, what how to how to look for a partner, how to nurture a relationship.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and we've only got our role models who are often really poor because they weren't educated themselves in how to conduct love and romance.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think and men as well.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and men as well.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like you know, their their capacity to understand, you know, expectation, yeah.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like I can think about they don't have those conversations that mothers and daughters may have or sisters.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: Correct, you know, correct.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think that's true, and yet, I mean, assuming we're talking obviously in a heterosexual context right now, but but obviously the men clearly are also trying to understand and be more educated because they have to be, but that also feeds into because if a man doesn't understand and feels just there's all about expectation, I don't know the complexities of your marriage.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: But 30 years is a long time.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's also part the that's the yin to the yang, and it's got to be part of the discussion, isn't it?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's right.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: You could tap dance all you like and be as well educated or you like if they are not also owning their journey, then there's nothing you can do if he chooses to feed his soul or whatever by betraying because he thinks that's culturally a solution.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that that the ground is changing now, right under our feet, isn't it?
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: You look at the Me Too movement and the whole idea of enthusiastic consent, you know, the fact that that's even talked about now, yeah, you know, shows how evolved we're becoming.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I do think, and certainly in my case, um, you know, I feel that we often spend more, we we're we're better at doing due diligence and purchasing a washing machine than we are at looking at who we're gonna be with and who we're gonna marry.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's true.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: So are they do they do are do we see things on the same page?
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: What were their previous relationships like?
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how honest are they?
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: All those sorts of things I think are really useful.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a little nugget of that I tried to pass on in the book, just some guidelines or some, you know, ideas for how you might um prepare yourself when you're launching into a lifelong commitment, you know, with somebody who um, you know, look, look, do do disclosure, you know, look at their family of origin as well.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't want to get too um mechanical and and prosaic about it.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, you know, it's worth it, it's a big decision.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: And also if you're bringing kids into the world, it's a big decision and we need to think carefully about it.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: No, I agree.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, we do it culturally.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are some people who say, you know, I want a particular cultural alignment.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: Why would it be any different?
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, it's sort of not completely like some people say, I want them to marry into you know a similar religion or a similar culture.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, so I suppose it doesn't, it's not such a long stretch to say, well, maybe we need to also have an understanding of their value system beyond that.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and that was good the way that you addressed that too.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I think look, the book is just a wonderful and brave and bold.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Annabelle Crab, there's a great quote that she and and she's wonderful.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: I love Annabelle, she's great.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: She's great.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: And she's she's a very big oh now, where's there's a great quote that I've read that she's well she might have been, well, she I because she's been, you know, with me she on the on the journey, really.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: And um she's a good friend, isn't she?
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Not a good friend, but she became a uh you know an acquaintance straps slash friend through this book.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we've both been in journalism for 40 years.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, she had as well as me, but you know, and and and watched each other and tippy toed around each other on occasions when we were doing profiles of the same people, but um but no, she's been very generous about the about the book and and and we've had a few discussions about um Yeah, she came out and said how how raw, and also I know what it was author Trent Trent Dalton, who I also think is wonderful and saw him at the Byron Writers Festival, and he praises it as saddening but wonderful and honest as fuck.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought go, Trent.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, and I think for all our listeners, I hope you go out and buy this wonderful book.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a really fascinating insight, not only in into your personal journey, but into the historical notion, potentially of hereditary infidelity and all of the other aspects that you touch on.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that is a really interesting aspect that you bring to the story, as well as a beautifully written book.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you so much for joining me on the What I've Learned podcast.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: I've loved talking to you.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: I've lost you too, and I'm like having read the book, I'm not gonna like, you know, I keep reading like paragraphs and going, this is so good, you know.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm a little bit amazing.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, I feel you, yeah, I feel you really tapped into it, and that's wonderful.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, the best thing for a writer when you speak to someone who you feel has understood in all its complexity.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you so much for being bringing your fine intelligence to bear on it, Deborah.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's been wonderful talking to you.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: Absolute pleasure, Kate, and good luck with the book.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I look forward to seeing what you do next.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you next time.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: See ya.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: Bye.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for listening.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: The What I've Learned podcast will now be coming to you weekly with new episodes released every Tuesday.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm blessed to have so many wonderful guests coming on the show.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: So check out my What I've Learned Instagram for updates.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, stay tuned, kind, and curious.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: Love Deb.