Chapter 1: What led Kate Legge to discover her husband's infidelity?
In 2007, journalist and writer Kate Legg followed her husband into the garage of their family home where he broke the news that he'd been having an affair. Greg and Kate had been together for some 30 years or so. They'd had children together, a life together and they'd shared a career in the same industry. Kate wrote that she flailed around for a while and then she recovered.
And then she got interested in the whole business of adultery, infidelity, having an affair, breaking the monogamous contract, whatever you want to call it. And so in 2019, Kate invited him to join her on a road trip to Broken Hill in New South Wales. to investigate his family history of infidelity, a history where infidelity had recurred over many generations.
And this investigation led Kate to look back at her own family history. Kate's written a book about this. It's called Infidelity and Other Affairs. Hi, Kate. Hello, Richard. You're still married to Greg now, even though you're no longer a couple. You've got separate partners now. How would you describe your relationship these days? Well, he's still pretty much my best friend, I'd have to say.
I always ring him when I've got a knotty problem to solve and we've got grandchildren together and so we've really tried to put our big people's pants on and channel our best selves and we get on very well. We both share an interest in current affairs and both journalists together and we have so much in common but we are married still.
We just haven't bothered to get divorced but we both have different partners and, you know, we get on very well. So it's a genuine friendship now, is it? Do you hang out sometimes? Yeah, well, when we have the grandchildren together, we hang out and sometimes we travel together, as we did to Broken Hill.
And I think my mother died when I was 23 and I was with Greg for longer than I knew my mother. And, you know, he's my family and the father of the children. And so, you know, there's a lot we have in common.
I'm just remembering there's that moment in the Woody Allen movie in Manhattan when his ex-wife Meryl Streep says, oh, I'm writing a book about our former marriage and then it gets made into a feature film and all of that. How did he respond when you told him you were going to write a book about it?
Well, he originally was very encouraging and the reason why we went to Broken Hill was to do the research so that I might write a fictional treatment of infidelity and the intergenerational story of infidelity in his family. And that's what I was intent on doing. And it was only during lockdown when I started to get another idea
I wanted to bring an authentic voice to what is a universal problem and I felt the best way to do that was in this series of essays. When I told him I was going to do this, I can still remember on the front porch of our family home where I said that I was thinking of going down the direction of non-fiction and there was a very, very, very long and awkward pause. I bet there was.
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Chapter 2: How did Kate and Greg's road trip to Broken Hill impact their relationship?
One word in front of another, trying to find an understanding of what we've gone through has really, really helped me. It feels weird asking you about the gory details on this bit, but it is in your book. How did he put it to you? Did he explain why he was telling you this now when he told you... He was having an affair in 2007?
Well, the first time he told me about it, he had to tell me about it because her husband had been sleuthing through their phone accounts and was going to tell me if my husband didn't. And so that was the reason why he called me out to the garage in the dun-coloured hue of dusk. And there, surrounded by the paint cans and the detritus of hard rubbish, he dumped his own.
And he didn't... He was able to finesse the chronology, so he really diminished... the affair and downplayed it. But it still didn't stop me from being bereft and hopping into the car and driving around the neighbourhood wondering where I was going to land with my stinking trouble. It was Sunday night. People were getting ready for school the next day, you know, supervising homework.
And I decided after a few laps of the neighbourhood that I was going to go back home and just hold on to this thing tight. Our oldest son was about to enter year 12 and I just didn't want to let a bomb go off in the household. And is that why he told you in the garage? Do you think so?
Chapter 3: What insights did Kate gain from her family's history of infidelity?
Oh, so no one else would hear, yes. So no one else would hear in the house. It was to spare your kids witnessing your distress. Did you have any inkling this was coming? I had no inkling whatsoever. I felt like I was dumb, deaf and blind. I had no idea. And it was with a friend of mine who I'd made a new friend in Melbourne and I was very close to. We'd gone on...
You know, we started off having dinners together and going on picnics together, often picking our children up from the same sporting events. And we even had a holiday together down at the Great Ocean Road about three weeks before I was hit with the bad news.
So that was also a very hard thing because I felt a sense of betrayal from both sides and I really felt like nobody had thought or considered me. I think when you're married that long, I think your personalities blend into each other to such an extent you can't even really... fully understand how much you blend together. You can't even see it because you're in the middle of it so much.
So when he said that to you, how did that kind of feel in your body, I suppose? Did you have a kind of a visceral reaction? A visceral reaction, yes. It's just complete shock. You have this pounding of heart and the coursing of your blood through your veins.
It really feels like you've driven through a plate glass window that you didn't really know was there until you're suddenly peeking out the shards of glass from your hair. Yeah. Is it like that or do you also feel sort of untethered from something? Totally untethered, totally untethered.
And because it was a shock, it's that shock, it's that visceral reaction of shock first, I think, before the emotions start to flow. And it was devastating. But because I had to really soldier on and because I had a child going into year 12, I really just had to pull myself together. And we both made a decision that we would try and work things out.
And he made all sorts of promises about how he was going to behave in the future and You know, it was a tough couple of years, but we struggled forward. And I must say, I resisted his request to go to counselling at first. I thought that actually he needed a bit of a crash course in honesty. And why did I need to do anything? That was my initial reaction.
And it was only the second episode of the infidelity that I really tried to get a grip on what had happened and understand things from his perspective. Was it just this one affair or had there been others? No, there'd been others and that was before he came back, before we agreed to work it out, I asked him to come clean so that I wouldn't stumble over any more dead bodies.
Did you want to kick him out of the house but thought you better not because you wanted to keep it okay? I did at first and then he pleaded to come back and he was very persuasive and very convincing. And as I said, because, you know, I really wanted to hold the family together. You know, he was a real pillar for me. He was an anchor for me. He'd always been very supportive of me.
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Chapter 4: How does Kate Legge's experience reflect on the nature of forgiveness?
Because you think Roosevelt had affairs. Of course. Truman famously did not. Eisenhower had an affair. JFK was JFK. Lyndon Johnson might have even been worse than JFK. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. But it doesn't turn voters off necessarily. No. And they're attracted to that sort of man. I mean, look at Bob Hawke. He was loved. by the public and the public loved Hazel.
And so they were hurt when he left Hazel for Blanche, but that didn't stop his electoral success. And similarly with Clinton, who was nonetheless able to keep his marriage together. And I find that really interesting too, that some marriages can survive it because Clinton for Hillary was so important. He was her sounding board. He was her backbone. and that marriage survived.
And I think these are interesting to look at these affairs. I mean, Camilla and Charles, for example. Now, look at that affair. But there are some affairs that will just endure. You say that your wedding to Greg was slightly tricky. Tell me about what made it so tricky. Well, look, I was vaguely aware of a story, a family story about his grandmother's affair.
But his father had left his mother for a younger woman who he'd had a longstanding affair with. And they would be, all the three of them would be there together forever. So Greg's mother was there? Greg's mother. Greg's dad and the younger woman. And the younger woman who had broken up their marriage, essentially. So you have to look at the seating arrangements quite closely.
Well, it wasn't that big a wedding, which was the problem, of course, because there were only 50 people. And so she brought her sisters along as Praetorian Guard. And, you know, we managed. But I never thought that this would come home to visit me. At that stage, I thought those were relationships with problems that were nothing to do with me.
I was launching a marriage here and that, you know, we had all the hope and optimism in the world. Tell me how Greg's mother had found out that her husband, Colin, Greg's father, was having an affair with this younger woman. Well, she was a little bit like me, Molly, and I think she was too busy doing things to sort of pay much attention. She was also very tolerant.
So he would often say he had to stay in town for business dinners and she thought these would be lubricated barred drink and so that was probably a good decision. And then one day she rang his office and she said, hello, and they said, can I speak to Colin? They said, who should I say is speaking? And she said, it's his wife. And they said... oh, Luda, how nice to hear from you.
And of course, Luda was the name of the other woman and she had no idea, Molly. Oh no, that must have been, that's a devastating way. Devastating way to find out. But again, when Colin came home, he completely doused her suspicions and insisted that the person who answered the phone hadn't a clue and they were an idiot and she shouldn't pay any attention to them and she didn't.
And so she was blindsided when he came to her one day after she'd returned from a study trip to China. She was one of the first groups of of Westerners into China at that time. And she came home and he had already moved out, but he didn't.
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Chapter 5: What are the psychological factors behind infidelity according to the discussion?
Everyone else went off like a rash of dominoes. And this new relationship I've got, it's been interesting for me because he... Wes has never married, he's got no children, but he's got lots of old girlfriends who come around all the time to visit. And once upon a time, I probably would have been really jealous. And I've just given all that away. And I think that's partly growing old too.
You know, if you love someone, you let them go. Because if the love's really strong love, you know, they'll stay, they'll stay. But they won't just because you leashed them to the door or you're following them or you've got a detective on their shoes. You know, you really, it has to be the love that keeps people together and the honesty. And...
Anyway, look, nothing's perfect and this isn't perfect either. And that's been one of the funny things about this relationship as well. But he's made me laugh, which is another wonderful thing, because if you can laugh, you're no longer persecuted. I don't know, there's the old KGB trick, dust their shoes with radium powder so you can figure out where they've gone with a Geiger counter.
Oh, look, I was, you know, despite being a good journalist, I was never a very good sleuth when it came to that. I mean, I had to be tipped off by somebody else. Kate, it's a completely fascinating story. Thank you so much. It's been really great speaking with you. Thank you once again. Thank you, Richard. It's been lovely.
I spoke with Kate Legg in 2023 about her book Infidelity and Other Affairs. Kate's got a new book coming out in April called Delicious, a series of essays on food and friendship. This episode of Conversations was made in the lands of the Gadigal people. Producer was Alice Moldovan. Executive producer was Carmel Rooney. I'm Richard Feidler. Thanks for listening.
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