Dude finds out about his wife's affair in her memoir

Author was married to another author. They agreed not to read each other's stuff while they were married. They were married 40 years, two kids, published 20 books between them. After so many decades, he finally read her memoir. John Skoyles wrote:

The Free Press

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So when my wife announced that she finished a new memoir (she had written several), I didn’t read it. As was her custom, she sent the manuscript to her two closest friends, and both advised against publishing it. A well-known writer, who she asked for a blurb, answered with a paragraph so bland as to be useless.

She seemed unfazed, but I was puzzled and asked her about the book. She said it dealt with her mother, who’d been dead for 22 years, instructing her on how to use her “womanly wiles.”

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Uh-huh. Poor schmuck. But give the boy credit, he didn't cuck out.

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Then the book was published and the reviews appeared. That’s when I understood why her friends had advised her against publishing it. “This breathtaking memoir reveals an illicit affair with her longtime New York editor,” read one. Another noted her “lengthy adulterous affair.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it and hoped that she had fictionalized the relationship, perhaps creating a hybrid of invention, exaggeration, and fact. As I was reading the reviews, a close friend called saying all I needed to know was one sentence: “I meet him in hotel rooms for 15 years.”

So it was true. Why had she done this? First, why had she had the affair, and second, why had she documented it and distributed it to the world without a second thought to me, our life, and our family?

I vividly recall the moment I confronted her. She was in the kitchen, filling hummingbird feeders with sugar water. I read the reviews aloud. She turned from her task and said she loved me. She said the affair meant nothing, that it was a fling.

I said that 15 years is not “a fling.”

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In short, he moved out to read the book. out even though he was 71 and she was 68. He couldn't read the book with her in the same house. Divorce followed.

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Even as papers were being signed, she sent a text message: “Do you think we can make it work, after all these years?”

All these years. I still feel the power of those words five years after our divorce, but I didn’t change my mind.

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He talks about the pain and how he recovered afterwards.