Scenes From a Marriage

To hear writer Isabel Fonseca describe it, her home life sounds positively serene. She and husband Martin Amis live with their two young daughters in London’s Primrose Hill, following a two-and-a-half-year idyll in a small Uruguayan village not far from Punta del Este. There, Amis and Fonseca built a new house, their kids learned Spanish and Fonseca penned her first novel. “The boats would come in, and you knew dinner had arrived because the seagulls would be going crazy,” recalls Fonseca, a dark-haired, earthy beauty, over a cup of tea one wet afternoon at London’s Covent Garden Hotel. The family has been back in London for a little more than a year. Amis, one of Britain’s most celebrated authors, is teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester, and Fonseca’s new book, Attachment., will be released in May.

Her new book, Attachment

But already the novel has sparked twitters in the scandal-loving British press for its themes—infidelity and marital angst—and the striking similarities between the book’s heroine, Jean Hubbard, and Fonseca herself. Both are 46-year-old former New Yorkers and Oxford- educated writers, though Hubbard is married to a British ad executive named Mark. Hubbard’s home is in London, and she and Mark have recently moved to an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where one day, after reading a letter addressed to Mark, Jean becomes convinced that he’s having an affair with a younger woman. The suspected affair, however, isn’t the only hanky-panky going on in the snappy, fast-paced—and often poignant—book.

“Marriage is a very interesting subject,” says Fonseca, who got together with Amis about 15 years ago, while he was still married to his first wife, Antonia Phillips, an American academic and the mother of his two sons. “The idea [that] there is going to be synchronicity throughout is almost laughable, isn’t it? How can we ever expect that? I think there are periods of difficulty. One of the good things about being a novelist is that you get to think about things and work it all out through your characters, instead of doing it.”

She concedes that she may have been asking for trouble given some of the parallels between Jean and Mark and the characters in her own home. But she insists that her novel is no roman à clef. “There’s a certain ease in writing about the things you know, of course,” says Fonseca, who is as self-deprecating as they come, poking fun at the padded shoulders on her Eighties Jil Sander coat and wondering aloud if an upcoming photo shoot will reveal bags under her eyes. “But it’s certainly not my marriage. There’s no winking thing going on about my life.”