Madoff's Sex/Money Paradox

Seth Wenig / AP Photo Sheryl Weinstein, the Ponzi victim who slept with Bernie—and just wrote a tell-all about it—might just be an Emma Bovary for the 21st century.

Sheryl Weinstein, who had a 20-year relationship with Ponzi king Bernie Madoff, is the latest incarnation of Gustave Flaubert’s Emma Bovary.

What could an Upper East Side baby boomer and former CFO of a wealthy charity have in common with the 19th century’s original Desperate Housewife? Emma Bovary certainly didn’t have a career, while Sheryl Weinstein, according to her hastily written tell-all, sometimes out-earned her husband Ronnie. And where Madame Bovary’s feckless financial behavior is partly explained by not having a day job, nobody could say that about Mrs. Weinstein, a Wharton-educated CPA who was controller of Lincoln Center before her 13-year stint at Hadassah, the well-endowed charity that invested millions of dollars with Bernie Madoff on her watch (and during her affair.)

Sheryl gave this man her life savings more easily than she gave herself physically.

Like Flaubert’s Emma, on the other hand, Sheryl is a product of the new middle class. She discovered Dijonaise sauce late in life and says she didn’t learn about “medium rare” until she went to college. There will be no arsenic for Sheryl, though—unlike Emma, she has a book deal.

You might think Weinstein’s memoir, released today to great fanfare by St. Martin’s Press, was too quickly produced to deserve high-culture comparisons. But Madoff’s Other Secret is a surprisingly good read, and even though it’s been dismissed as trash, any woman who has stepped out on a long-term relationship should be able to rise above literary snobbery. Those who snipe at Weinstein for being frank about adultery (yet so calculating and mum pre-publication!) may prefer that she copy Anna Karenina and throw herself onto the tracks. But I suspect some critics (Ira Sorkin, for example) are pretending not to understand. A breadwinner like Weinstein who creates a financial predicament often feels an obligation—and has every right—to try to correct it.

Madoff's Other Secret. By Sheryl Weinstein. 224 Pages. St. Martin's Press. $23.99. Still others have implied that Weinstein, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, ought to be wearing the scarlet “A” for adulteress, but Weinstein isn’t buying into the sexual shame game. She has apologized rather publicly to her husband for revealing so much about their marriage while offering useful tips to the rest of us about how to handle a sticky private confession. (When there was no plausible way to continue hiding her past affair from her husband, she told him her confession “was going to be a one-way conversation.” She didn’t want Ronnie to divulge “anything that may have happened in his life.”)

True confession: I hated Madame Bovary, sacrilegious as that sounds. I despised Emma Bovary for screwing up her life so thoroughly. From an early age, my role models were intelligent, diplomatic, and self-preserving cheaters who knew how to have their cake twice a day without destroying everyone they had ever lived with. Mistakes do happen, but a wise cheater sees each blunder as a teachable moment, treating adultery as a skill rather than a weakness or a sin.

Ever tried it? Then you’ll know how simple it isn’t.

It’s easier to be lured by cheap solutions or delusions while scattering the boundaries that once kept domestic harmony intact. You needn’t imbibe arsenic to realize that the most irritating thing about Madame Bovary is the fear you might become her, even a little bit, and screw things up quite a lot.