Other Women

This is the story I tell: In the spring of 1972, I was twenty-five years old, unhappily married and living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Like many women I knew then, I joined a feminist consciousness-raising group, to which I belonged for six months until I left my husband and moved across the country. A year later, when I briefly returned to pick up some possessions, I learned that, after my departure, my husband had serially and systematically slept with all the women in my group.

He’d been my college boyfriend and was a graduate student in mathematics. We’d gotten married during my senior year. The day before the wedding, my mother said, You can still call it off. Though I would have liked to, it seemed like too much trouble. I knew the marriage was a mistake. The hot buzz of romance had worn off, and there we were, stuck with each other at a historical moment when – or so we heard – the so-called sexual revolution was boiling all around us.

Another mistake: after college, I went to graduate school, where I spiralled into a long, persistent, low-grade nervous breakdown. Officially, I was a PhD candidate in medieval English literature. Unofficially, I was a semi-agoraphobic stoner who stayed in bed for days watching TV and tried never to leave the house except to attend an intermediate Latin class I needed to fulfil a language requirement. The class was on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I truly loved, but I failed all the quizzes and eventually stopped going.