On a cold Melbourne day one Queen’s Birthday weekend, Jo Peck was about to go shopping with her husband of 25 years when he dropped a bombshell. It was four weeks after her 60th birthday, the couple had just finished a renovation project and she was looking forward to retiring and travelling with the man she had lived with for half her life, when he told her: “I’m seeing someone else.’’
Peck, a Melbourne-based copywriter, was even more devastated that at a time when she was feeling increasingly invisible as an ageing woman, her husband had fallen for a woman in her mid-30s.
The only way she could deal with her shock and heartbreak was to write about it, so she penned her thoughts and experiences in a journal, and the result was her inspiring, honest and at times hilarious memoir, Suddenly Single at Sixty.
Peck writes: “And suddenly, I am reduced to a cliché's wife. He’s 62 and he’s having an affair – correction, he’s ‘in love’ – with a girl young enough to be his child.’’
For 30 years, Peck had been one half of a couple. They were Jo and “Rex” (a pseudonym). They went on adventurous cycling holidays and cared for guide dog puppies. They liked the same books and movies and travelling to the same places. They were part of a tight friendship group, their identities entwined by years of marriage and coupledom, and Peck writes that she felt like she was part of her husband’s DNA.
But a fortnight after their 25th wedding anniversary, the marriage was over. Although their relationship had never been smooth, she writes in her memoir, “I finally felt we were sailing into clear air”.
Peck writes about the early days after Rex dumped her: there was shock and denial, anger that he had betrayed her, and then an overwhelming sense of loss. She fled, moving out of the home they owned, which she had primarily funded, and stayed with friends – “Eve and Martin’' – who were also angry that Rex had deceived them all.
“I felt those initial feelings of betrayal and rejection and I thought ‘my life is over’. It was like life as I knew it had ended. I went into a period of deep depression and disbelief. The loss is just incredible because you haven’t just lost your partner, you’ve lost your certainty and you’ve lost your future.
“The main thing for me was I felt like I’d lost my identity. Because if I wasn’t part of that relationship, as Rex’s partner, I had no idea who I was.’’
That was seven years ago. The debut author recently turned 67, and to use another cliché, she’s never been happier. When we talk, she’s wearing an orange top chosen by her new(ish) partner, “Edwin”. Along with a sweeping life transformation, she has had a personal one, too, pointing out that her previously married self would have done the interview wearing baggy, black clothes.
Sense of purpose
Memoir can be a tricky genre as the writer shares their own insights and experiences while also revealing other people’s lives. For that reason, everyone in the book – apart from the author – has a pseudonym, and she won’t even reveal her former married name for fear of identifying Rex.
But her break-up has given her a sense of purpose. Peck talks confidently about her book and how much she loves her second chapter. She was happy enough being single but a year after the split, she met Edwin on an online dating site. He is a Melbourne tailor and they’ve lived together happily for the past five years. “He is easy to be with,’’ she nods. “And I never had an easy relationship with Rex.’’
Would she marry again? “God no!’’ she exclaims. She never really wanted to marry in the first place. But she writes that her 30-something self had suggested a wedding to Rex as a way to save their rocky relationship.
In the early days after her wedding, she liked being married and being called “a wife’'. She writes about Friday night picnics in the living room, followed by mutual foot rubs. “We were blissfully happy until, without warning, we weren’t.’’
Two years after they married, Rex became distant, retreating into his work managing a school. Peck got close to a man at work: 23 years before Rex would find someone else, she was the one who had the affair. “This man was there for me when my husband wasn’t, and being in his company felt like walking into a warm cosy room full of comfy sofas where I was welcomed rather than shunned,’’ she writes.
Two years after her wedding, she temporarily separated from Rex, weighing up the pros and cons of returning to him. Eventually, they got back together, but their marriage was never easy. It had a level of dysfunction she got used to. Rex battled mental health problems, his moods dominated their relationship and she got used to treading on eggshells.
Peck rationalised it. She knew couples who weren’t having sex or they didn’t speak or constantly fought. “Everyone’s relationship is a little bit wrong. I just thought mine was wrong in a way I could live with,’’ she tells the Listener.
“I loved the life we had built. We had great friends, and we did amazing things together. He was a really fun person to be with. When he was depressed, he was unreachable and I learnt to put up with that.’’
Accepting responsibility
Her purpose for putting her journal into the world was to reveal how a devastating moment can be transformative. She has a strong view that we have one life and that so many people put up with a “good enough” relationship. An estimated half of long-term relationships end, and about three in 10 marriages don’t last in New Zealand and across the Tasman.
Part of her therapy was to write down her emotions. “My therapist helped me realise that it can’t be all about him; I must have played some sort of enabling role. I realised my role was letting his moods happen and not challenging him to try to fix his situation.
“That was quite investigative for me and I just started writing a diary of my misery. It was never intended to be a book; it was just meant to help me through that dark period.’’
The first draft of the memoir she wrote was more attacking. It was his fault their marriage had ended; he was “a bastard” and Peck made herself a victim.
That first draft done, she put the book aside and travelled around Australia on a van trip with Edwin for a year. While she was away, she asked a writing mentor to read the manuscript. Her advice? Peck had to accept her role in the break-up to give the story more depth and integrity. The mentor advised her that “people aren’t all good or bad, they’re complex’'.
“It was a complete revelation to me that as I got further into the writing process and as I started to feel empowered, I began to feel like this might not be so bad after all.
“With that came the feeling that if I’m experiencing this, other women would be going through this, and I could keep writing and make it into something that might help other women going through the same thing.”
Peck grew up in Healesville, a small town in Victoria’s Yarra Valley. She talks briefly about the trauma of losing her mother, Olive, to cervical cancer when she was 10, an experience that left her with abandonment issues. Her mother’s death was a devastating turning point in Peck’s life, according to her therapist, “which is why, over time, I put up with more and more from Rex and learnt to accommodate our special brand of domestic derangement as the norm. The alternative, the possibility of being abandoned again, was just not an option for me,’’ she writes.
Financial toll
Peck worked in advertising for 35 years, co-running her own ad agency, Working Girls Advertising, for 20 years.
She and Rex did not have children, and she was the main breadwinner. One of her outrages she shares in her memoir was the stress of their financial settlement. It took a year, and she racked up hefty legal bills. Rex and his lawyer initially demanded a 60/40 split because he had retired and wanted to claim some of her business.
She writes, “I ran the facts: Rex had cheated on me, I was the injured party, I was the one who’d had to go and find a place to rent, I was the one whose life had been totally dislocated, I was the one who’d had to set up from scratch, I was the one in therapy, I was the one still working, I was the one who had contributed the lion’s share to our ‘joint assets’. And yet it seemed I was going to have to pay him for the privilege of him shitting all over me.’’
They finally agreed on a 52/48 split in Rex’s favour “based on the fact that he was older than me and therefore had less earning potential. He had retired, for fuck’s sake – voluntarily!’’
While she was happy to stay single – and she has friends in midlife who have chosen this path – the world had changed since she met Rex and online dating sites were the new norm. According to one site, Bumble, 39% of its users have come out of a serious relationship within the previous two years. There were one billion matches globally on Bumble in 2022.
In a brave and honest account, Peck writes about her fascination with connecting with men from a wide range of backgrounds. There was Rudy, who had an open relationship, and whose girlfriend rang one night while he was at Peck’s apartment.
“I struck upon that idea of online dating being a social experiment to see how I might be able to change my life. I thought: use it to build your confidence. Use it to learn new things. Use it to be a better person. Use it to learn more about yourself and learn more about what’s out there in the world. I absolutely loved it.’’
Blank slate
As she prepares for her book launch this month, she describes herself as a “vigilante for people who are in relationships where they just put up and shut up and think, ‘This is as good as it’s going to get for me’. I want them to know that if they could be brave enough to step out of that, loss can be a really powerful transformative motivator.
“You can find yourself in a space that is a blank slate and that’s really scary, but it also could be the most exciting thing you ever step into. I want to share that feeling. I want people to know that good enough is not good enough.’’
Nor does she want readers to think, “She’s been dumped at 60 – oh god, poor woman’'. We need to reframe midlife, says Peck, who points out that with age comes wisdom, confidence and experience. She also writes freely about finding pleasure in the sex she had with lovers. “You can have some of the best sex of your life at 60. And I’m not ashamed of that and we need to get that message out.’’
Peck hasn’t seen Rex for some time because he has moved from Melbourne with his partner. But she emailed him to tell him the book was coming out, on her publisher’s advice.
Edwin was supportive and has read her book. “He pointed out that on our first date, I wasn’t wearing jeans but another pair of pants. I said to him, ‘Oh look, does it really matter?’’' she laughs.
But Edwin helps her be the best version of herself. She has got used to “living out loud and not caring about the consequences’'.
“I was pretty happy when that divorce went through and I felt like me again. I’m Jo Peck again.’’
Suddenly Single at Sixty: A Memoir, by Jo Peck (Text Publishing, RRP $45), is out now.
