An ex-public schoolboy has revealed in a gripping memoir how he spiralled into a midlife crisis after marrying his former Spanish teacher who seduced him aged 17.
Joe Gibson, who has chosen to protect his identity using a pseudonym, has penned Seventeen: A Coming Of Age Story, recounting the impact of a relationship between himself as teenage boy and his 35-year-old teacher.
The Mrs Robison-esque story doesn’t shy away from the stark reality of the problematic relationship, which saw Joe struggle throughout his life to come to terms with what happened to him.
In the Mail Online the author shared extracts from the book detailing how the legacy of the love affair shaped his family life, his career and his whole outlook.
In one passage he recalls the narrative of torment in his own mind as he sits down for dinner with Mrs P who is at his home to give him a ‘private tutorial’ while his mother is in the same house.
He writes: “What I am sure of is that I have split myself in two. I’ve carved out two distinct versions of me. A double life.
“Old me, who goes to school, sits in lessons, does homework, sings in chapel, chats to the lads about nothing important.
“Other me, who exists in a parallel universe of secrecy, lying on demand, pretending I’m not a teenager but a real grown-up man.”
The extract continues to detail how a brazen Mrs P fondles the young man’s inner thigh with her foot under the table even as his mother fetches dessert.
Incredibly a brazen Mrs P, writes Joe, also asked him to take her to the school prom as his date but he manages to reduce the meeting to a “compromise” of a dance.
Fast-forward nearly 20 years and Mrs P is the mother of two of Joe’s children, but he has now made the decision to leave her.
Talking to a friend Pete, Joe almost writes that he “was party to it” and “let it happen. It takes two..” but rightly Pete points out: “She was 35. You were 17, for Christ’s sake. A kid.”
Joe details how the stress of coping with his seduction and later marriage to the teacher led him to lose himself and his career ambitions until he was “burnt out” and a “doctor signed me off work with exhaustion”.
Joe Gibson is a pseudonym. Adapted from Seventeen: A Coming Of Age Story, by Joe Gibson, to be published by Simon & Schuster on July 20. £16.99
