I'm Jo Peck again

Four weeks after her 60th birthday, Jo Peck's husband of 25 years told her he was seeing someone else. In a new book, she details how shock and disbelief made way for happiness and contentment.

- SARAH CATHERALL

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".