Seduction Theory

by Emily Adrian

Genres: Women's Fiction; Family Life

Synopsis

For fans of Conversations with Friends and Vladimir comes a magnetic, fresh take on marriage and loyalty: when two married professors tiptoe toward infidelity, their transgressions are brought to light in a graduate student’s searing thesis project.

Simone is the star of Edwards University’s creative writing department: renowned Woolf scholar, grief memoirist, and campus sex icon. Her less glamorous and ostensibly devoted husband, Ethan, is a forgotten novelist and lecturer in the same department. But when Ethan and the department administrative assistant Abigail have sex, Simone and Ethan’s faith in their flawless marriage is rattled.

Simone has secrets of her own. While Ethan’s away for the summer, she becomes inordinately close with her advisee, graduate student Roberta “Robbie” Green. In Robbie, Simone finds a new running partner, confidante, and disciple—or so she believes. Behind Simone’s back, Robbie fictionalizes her mentor’s marriage in a breathtakingly invasive MFA thesis. Determined to tell her version of the story, Robbie paints a revealing portrait of Simone, Ethan, Abigail, and even herself, scratching at the very surface of what may—or may not—be the truth.

Innovative, witty, and tender, Seduction Theory exposes the intoxicating nature of power and attraction, masterfully demonstrating how love and betrayal can coexist.

Release date: August 12, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 224

Sample

At the creative writing department’s end-of-year party, Ethan’s secretary fed him kale with her fingers. Ethan wasn’t supposed to call Abigail his secretary. Trouble was, Abigail often referred to herself as his secretary in wry subversion of the school’s progressive values, and her jokes had eclipsed her actual job title in Ethan’s memory. The party was crowded. Grad students were crammed into the kitchen, hoping their advisors heard them talking about sex. In the adjacent living room, academic spouses grew weary of discussing summer plans, as if everyone had summers off. Soon the house would overheat. Guests would spill into the yard but for now stayed close to the collapsible buffet table on which they’d placed their offerings. “I brought the kale salad,” said Abigail, who was not attractive but to whom Ethan was attracted. He’d formed a habit of fixating on her least appealing features, her crusty eyelashes and fleshy earlobes, daring his lust to subside, which it did not.

“I’m not a fan of that vegetable,” he admitted.

“Oh, I massaged it. Have you ever had it massaged?” She looked deep into his eyes with an intensity that might have indicated sexual devotion but was not uncommon in the type of person by whom Ethan found himself daily surrounded.

“I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t know how it’s usually prepared.”

She stuck an arm between two adjuncts and grabbed a fistful of her own salad. She was drunk. He was excited.

Abigail shoved the greens through Ethan’s closed lips. Oh, they were terrible. Coarse and curled and bitter, gritty with some kind of debris. “Are there nuts in this?” he asked.

“Quinoa.”

“Ah,” he said, chewing indefinitely. “That is different.”

Pleased, she drank her drink. Ethan stood ass-to-ass with party host and department chair Joyce Lockhart, who was engaged in a separate conversation. “We adopted him when he was seven,” Joyce was saying. “He was called Humphrey on his papers, which, no. Then we discovered he hates females his own age but loves puppies, so we named him Humbert!” Temperate laughter. Someone’s sandalwood perfume. “Lola” by the Kinks.

“Do you want to smoke a cigarette?” Ethan asked Abigail. These were the first words he had spoken to his beautiful wife, Simone, when they were just shy of twenty-one. Abigail would not want to smoke a cigarette because Abigail was thirty-nine, a single mother, and wearing a scarf in June. Abigail said, “Oh!” and “Yes?”

That Abigail said yes might be the whole story.

Depending on the wind, the town smelled of turkey shit from the turkey farm or sugar from the cereal factory. The town necessitated long underwear, compost piles, one fundraiser after another. No one affiliated with Edwards would admit any fondness for the town except undergrads committed to college-town mystique. Few would claim to hate Londonville as Ethan did. His hate was a comfort, a creed. He knew who he was and where he would never belong.

Abigail sniffed the air and said, “Turkey shit.” Was she not a grown-up version of the girls he’d kissed behind the bleachers at his high school in Portland, Oregon, one hundred years ago? Ethan recognized the thought as a version of what all adulterers told themselves: the affair was predestined, inevitable. Had essentially already happened. What they were doing was not an affair because Ethan had never laid a hand on Abigail. But it also was, because leaving a department potluck to buy cigarettes was better than sex.

“Tell me something,” he said. It was a game. No follow-up question, but an open call for something, anything. To use the line on Abigail was not a betrayal but a test. She would falter, she would fail, proving she was not the other woman but the lesser woman.

“Oh,” Abigail said. “I’ve never smoked a cigarette. This will be my first.”

He was so happy. “Say more!”

“I’ve always tried to limit my vices. I drink sometimes, but that’s about it. I think I’m fundamentally a bad person, like in my soul, so I don’t really need the accessories.”

“What makes you bad?”

“I want to punch everyone I’ve ever been mad at. Steal from anyone I envy. Jump into bed with anyone who pays me a compliment.”

Her silence started a clock. This was his chance to say You have a beautiful neck or Your posture is pristine.

Ethan said, “I’m trying to guess your middle name.”

“You’ll be guessing all night.”

He guessed Wendy and Crystal and Inez. She said, “No” and “Ha!” and “My middle name is Marie.”

“Marie is common.”

“I know, sweetie.”

His blood ran warm. He held open the door to Shef’s Convenience and watched Abigail go through it. Her gauzy scarf was gray or green; her gauzy dress was green or blue. These clothes were in the business of implying, not flattering. He wanted her to wear what he wanted all women to wear, what his wife wore: tight jeans and a black tank top. The style did not strike him as particular to Simone. He did not realize the extent to which he didn’t know women and only knew Simone.

Beside the register was a bowl of rotten bananas and a folded index card on which an employee had scrawled BANANAS 75 CENTS. Ethan regarded Abigail regarding the inedible fruit—her open skepticism and repressed laughter—and wanted to lick the neck he’d failed to compliment. Instead, he selected a turquoise lighter and asked for Camels. How did he and Abigail appear to the man behind the counter? Ethan thought they might look like teenagers, wild with tension, on the edge of oblivion. The door buzzed as they left and he thought, no. They looked like what they were.

The sky performed a sunset. From his first inhale Ethan was desperate to grind the cigarette beneath his shoe. After all these years, smoking felt silly and indecent. He could barely look at his secretary, whose shallow puffs bespoke mutual regret. God, he missed his wife. Simone, tenured, had skipped the party to stay home and read. He wanted to divorce her so they could meet by chance ten years from now and do everything they’d ever done a second time.

“How’s your—”

“Don’t,” he said.

“I was going to say book.”

“I know you were. I should’ve been a carpenter.”

“I’ve heard that line about a thousand times. What is it with you people and carpentry?”

“We’re useless with our hands.” He offered her the one without the cigarette. “Feel how soft. I’ve never labored!”

She touched his hand. They rounded the corner of Maple Street and encountered a small, quivering terrier.

Abigail gasped. “That’s Humbert!”

“Who?” He wanted her attention to himself.

“Joyce’s dog. He must’ve gotten out.” Abigail sank to the ground and collapsed her shoulders. She looked lopsided, submissive. “Come here, sweetie.”

“The real Humbert Humbert loathed dogs,” Ethan said.

Abigail laughed. “The real?”

Ethan decided to let this woman change him. In this moment he would be dog-friendly. He ceased looming and copied her crouch. Humbert approached, and Ethan palmed the animal’s undercarriage. The terrier vibrated warmly in his arms, and the word that came to Ethan’s mind was winner.

It was hotter inside the house than out. Perspiration shone on every forehead. Were academics sweatier than regular people? He posed this question to Simone in his mind. Ethan waited at the threshold of the party, heroically holding the dog. I saw him come in, and back then I knew him only as Simone’s unworthy husband, whose fiction workshop I’d so far avoided, whose pedagogy skewed teddy bear. He looked so proud proffering the terrier. Euphoric, enchanted even. Abigail gazed up at him, the first lady of his office of self-destruction. Was this what Simone had seen in him when she was my age?

“Humbert!” Joyce’s many beaded necklaces slapped as she made her way through the crowd. Rosewater. Room-temperature pork. “These Days” by Nico. “He was supposed to be shut inside our bedroom!” Joyce looked mischievously or judgmentally or neutrally between Abigail and Ethan. “Did you let him out?”

“We found him on Maple Street,” Abigail said.

“Goodness.” Stroking the dog’s small skull, Joyce showered him with kisses and admonishments. Ethan looked down at Abigail. Hers was the load-bearing smile of middle age, revealing every wrinkle she would ever have.

“I’m going to exit this party soon,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Abigail said. “Time for me to relieve my babysitter. I’m likely to crawl into bed with my five-year-old so I don’t have to sleep alone.”

“I love your honesty,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said. “I love that you’re seven feet tall.”

He was only six four.

Ethan didn’t need to convince himself his wife was beautiful; she always had been, was becoming more so as they aged. Tonight she had fallen asleep with the lights on. She wore gray, university-branded sweatpants and a silk shirt half open to an expensive bralette. Strewn across Ethan’s side of the bed were Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, several Cambridge Companions, and a plate smeared with ketchup. He removed the plate and stacked the books on the nightstand. Stripping down to his boxer briefs, he flipped the light switch and arranged his body against hers on the mattress. “Tell me something,” he said.

He felt his wife emerge from shallow sleep. He felt her struggle to produce a compelling answer. The struggle meant something to him.

“Reviewer two fucked me over,” she said.

Ethan considered himself comfortable with the ways Simone was a real professor, and he was not. She had a Yale PhD, a scholarly book with Oxford, a daunting list of publications—though her students worshipped her for a popular memoir she’d written about her mom, and for her hair.

What his wife wanted was to speculate about reviewer two’s identity. The peer who had fucked Simone’s article was almost certainly a close friend from her Yale cohort. Reviewer two might have been Marshall, who’d taken twelve years to write a dissertation and landed at NYU Singapore, or Mackenzie, a Wiccan who once hissed at Simone mid-seminar, “Bite your tongue!”

Ethan and Simone had fallen in love at Vassar. After graduation he moved with her to Connecticut, where he worked at a coffee shop and wrote Muse, the novel that qualified him for the spousal hire at Edwards. During those years in New Haven he’d contracted an outsider’s inferiority complex while cultivating a sexy, edgy indifference to academia. They were married in the living room of their Wooster Square apartment amid pizza boxes. “Elvis Presley’s Blues” by Gillian Welch. Metal bars on the window. Simone’s vintage minidress evoked spontaneity, Las Vegas. They vowed never to lose interest in each other. Guests weren’t sure if the wedding was ironic or sincere, and their gifts reflected their uncertainty. There was a cake pan shaped like Hogwarts and a set of blue martini glasses.

They decided never to have children. “I want to spend the rest of my life reading books and undressing you,” Simone said, eyes welling with wine-warmed tears. What had Ethan said? What he always said to her. Yes.

Tonight he didn’t care about reviewer two. From his wife he craved a compliment, or some indication he was known beyond the parts of himself he advertised. For instance, she might roll over and ask, “When did you get so lonely?”

Alternatively, he would accept a piece of personal lore she’d waited until now to tell him, intuiting he would need to be reeled in from the waters of infidelity. Was she voted homecoming queen at Chappaqua High School? Did she ever stash an infant turtle in her closet until it died? Say something funny, he thought. Make a little joke!

Simone had gone back to sleep.

In the morning, the happy couple jogged into the path of their secretary. Abigail held a paper sack of groceries beneath one arm and wore linen pants cut into shorts. She had knees like the rumpled faces of newborns. Where was Byron, her five-year-old son? Maybe waiting in the car, if that was legal, or—knowing Abigail—even if it wasn’t.

Did Ethan still categorize the cigarette he’d smoked with Abigail as infidelity? No. The cigarette had assumed the abstract, blameless quality of images that flashed through his mind during intercourse: Shin guards on a volleyball player. Tattooed cashier at the hardware store. He was unaware of any recklessness in his thoughts or behavior. He was aware of being a novelist who hadn’t sold a book since he was twenty-six, and of a morning heat too aggressive for June, and of Simone’s sweat mixing with traces of her cologne.

“Hello Abigail,” Simone said. “Were you at the party last night? Did you have more fun than my husband?”

Abigail spoke into her grocery sack. “I love dogs, so.”

Simone’s smile was broad and genuine. Weirdos were her weakness.

“We found Joyce Lockhart’s dog,” Ethan explained. “Stepped outside for some air and there he was.”

Ethan’s embarrassment in the moment was out of proportion with what was happening. His secretary was talking to his wife. His wife was beautiful, and his secretary’s neck was slick with sunscreen. Abigail asked about their plans for the summer: they were going to Oregon, the annual trip Ethan received in exchange for living in the Northeast, where people referred to anything outside as “nature.” His mom, Lois, still lived in Portland, and he missed his mom. His missing Lois could not compete with Simone missing her mother, who was dead.

“Portland? I’m going there too. Middle of July,” Abigail said. “Maybe we—”

Ethan laughed.

“Well.”

The three of them stood on the sidewalk smiling at each other.

Jogging is foreplay. Those spandex-clad couples wearing fanny packs and shamelessly sweating outside the coffee shop, they’re about to fuck. Whenever I saw Simone and Ethan out for their Saturday morning 5k—her stride short and efficient, his bouncy, uncontrolled—I would torture myself picturin. . .