There is such wisdom in Molly McCloskey’s writing. This is a book about love, marriage, affairs, and aging told from the perspective of a middle-aged woman looking back at her life. Her relationships to her husband, lover, and parents form the biggest part of it, but she also writes about her experiences in NGO work around the world and makes sober assessments about the nature of mankind. She seems to write effortlessly as she blends together emotions, humor, and pathos, and through it all there is great honesty. The sexual aspects of the affair hinted at by the book’s title are very restrained, but all the more erotic because of it, especially when the narrator is so intelligent. Highly recommended.

Quotes:
On aging:
“Now I am old enough to know that there are people I would like to see again whom I have already seen for the last time, there are places I dream of returning to that I will never revisit, and that though a few things do come around again and offer themselves, many more do not.”

On Americans:
“I had seen that what gave rise to the greatest derision was the tendency of Americans to be both credulous and easily impressed.”

On death:
“When I returned to Nairobi after her funeral, I felt my mother everywhere. I was awash in an indiscriminate tenderness I neither expected nor understood. Everything moved me. Everything – from a birdcall, to the green of the grass, to the children playing soccer on the pitch near my home – overwhelmed me with its life. I swung between a lightness of being that bordered on vertigo and a sorrow that made the least movement difficult. In my grief, I felt awakened to the world, and a strange, acute euphoria sometimes stole over me. What I felt, in fact, was perpetually astonished.”

On love and marriage:
“I read once that to commit to love is to commit to love’s diminishment. Which means that commitment is less about optimism than it is about realism – accepting that love is doomed to become less of itself, and proceeding anyway, in the faith that one will be equal to that truth when it arrives.”

On mankind:
“Then Harry says that the difference between nations is the degree to which acts of everyday barbarity are tucked away, conducted out of sight, and that what we call civilization, and what we know as peace, is only the papering over of what we really are: violent, venal, full of fear.”

On men and women:
“Harry keeps eyeing me but doesn’t comment. He is doing that thing men sometimes do. You tell them something big and confusing, something that’s really rocked you, the sort of thing that would make a woman scoot forward on her chair so that the two of you could parse the thing to death, and they say nothing. And you are never sure if they are holding it there, in silence and respect, letting you sort it the way they sort things, or if they are simply at a loss, unable to cross easily from the territory of information to the territory of feeling.” ( )

The introspective thought process of an adultress looking back on her life and the choices she made. ( )

Molly McCloskey is an American who spent decades living in Ireland. Here she tells the story of an American woman who travels to Ireland and ends up staying. Alice gets a temporary job tending bar in Sligo, a large town on the west coast, and ends up marrying a local and staying. The novel goes back and forth through Alice's adult life, from her experiences as a young woman exploring a new place, to her marriage and it's demise, and her life afterward working for an NGO and traveling to various places in distress. The story itself is introspective; Alice imploded her own marriage with an affair, an affair where she grew increasingly reckless, as though she wanted to get caught.

This is a lovely, small novel about a woman looking inward for the first time in middle age. This isn't a book primarily about her infidelity (the original, European title is When Light Is Like Water), but a look back at an entire life, of which the adultery formed a part and that Alice looked back on as a part of her life she struggles to understand. Far more interesting were the snippets about her work for the Irish NGO, which sent her to places like Sri Lanka and Kosovo and Kenya.

This is a slender novel that packs a lot into it. I'm torn between thinking it was too short and lacked amplifying detail and thinking that it was wise of the author to leave more out than she put it. McCloskey is a skilled writer, with an observant eye and I look forward to reading more from her. ( )

This is a psychological tale of the consequences of the choice to "stray" while married. Fairly common subject, right? I found this treatment unusually wonderful. McCloskey writes in the first person, from the internal monologue of the protagonist. The reader is privy to the self-scrutiny the character goes through every step of the way. The prose is sensitive and evocative. We read about her desires, stubbornness, fears, observations, and hypotheses about her own motivations. I do not have personal experience with straying, but I will say that I broke down in tears because her treatment of separation is entirely spot on. I think she went on a bit far at the end, and the issues with her mother were dealt with more superficially. Excellent read! ( )

I'm always looking for a new book that's slightly outside my comfort zone of fast-paced, adventurous reads. Sadly, Straying did not fit the bill. It was just a little too slow for me, with a little too much of nothing happening. I've seen a few reviews call it introspective and I think that is the perfect description for this book. Although I could not finish it, if slow, reflective books are your thing, then I would recommend this.