Kate Legge

And off we went and I, you know, took the exit ramp off the freeway full of confidence and ran smack bang into a booze bus.

And I didn't know then that emotional dysregulation can inflate your alcohol reading.

And I was a bag of bones.

I weighed 52 kilograms and, of course, flew confidently into the straw and unfortunately I blew 0.08.

And I was sitting in the booze bus and my son, who was 19 at the time, rang and said, Mum, where are you?

So I had to fess up.

I was absolutely ashamed.

And that night I really felt like I was losing things.

I remember going outside and just sobbing at the moon and thinking, well, I wish this downward spiral would stop.

Oh, God, you must have felt so wretched in that moment.

Oh, shocking, shocking.

I felt like everything was falling apart.

Yeah, every hold I had on the world had come untethered.

You know, things fly apart when the centre doesn't hold, as Yates wrote.

So after a while, you thought, being a journalist, that you could write about this or investigate it.

I wonder if this idea of investigating the phenomenon of infidelity...

You thought it might give you some distance on what had happened to you.

It did.

And at the time it first happened, I did my first impulse, because a writer's first therapeutic impulse is to write.

And I had started to take notes.