Kate Legge

Kate, in all honesty, would it have really been much better if he'd sat down and said, I'm flirting with this woman.

I think I'm going to have an affair with her.

Yes, I think it would have.

It would have really focused my attention on the problem at hand.

And you see, I was probably too dismissive when he was trying to raise it as an issue, when he was trying to say that there were faults in our marriage.

And I wasn't addressing them.

But I think I always said to him that if you told me that that's what you were thinking of doing, my goodness, you would have got my attention.

You quote that famous line of Tolstoy's, which he begins Anna Karenina with, which is, all happy families are alike, but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.

Why did you want to write about your own family in the light of what you discovered about Greg and his family?

Well, I've always been fascinated by the darker side of love, I guess, as much as I am about the joy and wonder of love.

And also as a journalist, you're fascinated by the grey areas between fact and fiction.

And I think that was probably what grabbed my attention and what made me want to write about it.

It starts with your mother.

But every affair is different too.

Every affair is different.

As Tolstoy said, well, he was talking about happy families and unhappy families.

Yes, but when he begins that story, it's actually about a marriage that's been blown up by the husband's infidelity.

Infidelity.

Yeah.

But I also love his line where he has Count Fronsky talking to the ambassador's wife when she says to him she thinks that marriage is founded on reason of the happiest marriages.