Teresa J. Conway
A field manual on adultery, written by someone who's lived it.
I started writing about adultery in 2015 because nobody else was writing the version I needed to read. The advice columns wanted to fix me. The recovery memoirs wanted me to repent. The forums wanted me to log my screen time and color-code my texts. None of it sounded like the women I knew — the ones who were doing it on purpose, and doing it well, and not falling apart.
So I wrote what I had. The opening lines that worked. The hotel bars that didn't. The text I sent the morning my husband almost found out. The afternoon I drove home from a man's apartment with my dress on inside-out and stopped at a Kroger to buy bread, because that's what a wife who'd been running errands would do.
Ten years later there are something like three hundred dispatches in the archive. Most started on Medium. A few got me banned. The rest live here now, in one place, on a domain I own, in a tone nobody can demonetize.
I'm not here to teach you how to leave. I'm not here to teach you how to stay. I'm here because the women who do this — and the men who do this — deserve a writer who isn't squeamish about the logistics. The toothbrush you keep in your car. The phone you set to airplane mode at the right moment. The version of yourself you become at 3 p.m. on a Wednesday and put back in the box by 5.
If that's the manual you've been looking for, you're in the right place.
What you'll find here
The Lead
A new piece every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Long-form, voice-driven, written like you're sitting across from me at a hotel bar.
The Archive
Three-hundred-plus dispatches going back to 2015. Searchable. The opsec ones still hold up. The early ones are honest in a way I can't replicate now.
Books
The Ella series. The Ashley Madison field guides for men. The how-tos. Everything I've put between covers, and what's coming next.
The Newsletter
A weekly dispatch on Substack. The piece I didn't put on the site, the one I wasn't sure I wanted public, plus whatever I'm reading.
The pen name question
Teresa Conway is the byline. Maddie Rose is the same hand under another name — the memoir, the Red Delicious Diaries, the books I write when I want to be even less careful than I am here. Her catalog lives over here.
If you've followed me from Medium, from Substack, from one of the dating apps where someone forwarded a piece, from the comment section of an Ashley Madison thread — welcome. I'm glad you found the home address.