Kate Legge

Why did you want to write this book?

Why did you want to come forward with this story?

Well, because I think we share our stories so that other people can understand or perhaps recognise what they've gone through or find a handrail or a banister to pull them out of despair.

And I've always found that in my journalism, the people who have fascinated me most are the people who come to Forgiveness.

I interviewed this woman in Hobart.

She'd looked after her oceanographer husband through dementia.

She'd nursed him through dementia, and he used to work for the Defence Department, so there were boxes and boxes of his stuff in the garage.

Garages are fascinating places, Richard.

So much happens in them, obviously.

It's definitely a place to be avoided.

And she sat there all day in this wintry Hobart day going through the boxes and shredding a lot of material and she got to the very last box at dusk.

on a cold wintry day, and it was full of the letters and the correspondence that he had written with his numerous mistresses and lovers throughout his life.

And she had to sit there and read it on her own.

She couldn't even, had no one to rail against because he had passed.

She sat up all night, she said, in her clothes, drank a glass of whiskey, and then the next morning she wrote a letter to one of the women who had had the most longest and intense relationship with her husband in an attempt to understand a side of this man that she'd never known.

And that's how she got to a place of forgiveness.

And telling her story helped me to get to a place of acceptance.

And she made the approach to me to talk about this because she'd read a story I'd written about first wives who had left their husbands because their husbands had been unfaithful.

And when their husbands got terminally ill, they came back to look after them.

It seems like there's two conflicting desires here.