Walking into a marriage, eyes wide shut

The ex-wife of rugby league Immortal Andrew Johns has spilled the beans on their doomed union in a heartlessly superficial memoir that makes her devaluation seem deserved.

Cathrine Mahoney and her former husband Andrew Johns at the 2008 Dally M awards.

Recognising its potential to ruffle Middle Australian feathers, Cathrine Mahoney, the comedic 47-year-old English podcaster, former publicist and “self-confessed oversharer” once married to once-troubled rugby league Immortal and TV pundit Andrew Johns, changed the title of her midlife memoir from Actually, I Don’t Like Cricket or Blowjobs to the significantly more supermarket-friendly Currently Between Husbands.

For those unacquainted with the 2014 gossip: a fortnight before Mahoney’s 40th birthday, “the wheels unexpectedly fell off” her marriage. No Conscious Uncoupling was involved; Johns was having an affair.

In the circumstances, was the marital split really so “unexpected”?

Johns, who like all celebrated sportsmen and musicians was relentlessly targeted by women, had telephone numbers thrust into his hand even when his other arm was around Mahoney. He regularly disappeared without explanation for lost weekends. He was often on the cover of newspapers and the stories were not always flattering, which “certainly took the shine off the sparkler” on her left hand, yet Mahoney walked into the marriage, eyes wide shut.

The pair at their 2007 wedding.

“I had to decide early on if I was going to trust Andrew or not,” Mahoney writes. “A whole lot of sleepless nights, jealousy and paranoia awaited if I didn’t. I took him at face value when he said he was committed to me, and I trusted him.”

However ardently Mahoney insists that she was “totally and utterly smitten” with the clearly fascinated Johns, there is the sense that she was smitten just that little bit more by the sense of security and sharp upgrade in status that he offered her. When she discusses Johns, it is more in terms of what he did for her and achieved rather than any particular attributes – say, intelligence or spiritual depth. Her subconscious was, perhaps, more truthful (“Sometimes my thoughts drifted to the future and I didn’t see Andrew and I still together in it”).

Mahoney worried “that maybe I’d had this amazing life of clubbing, fun and nights out when I was younger, and great jobs at Sony Music … had I just used all my fun vouchers?” This love of “fun” goes some way to explaining her choice to marry a man with whom she had almost nothing in common.

Instead of musing on these points, Mahoney, in “the lead up to the big day”, directed almost all her focus on “picking the perfect cake (or rather, cupcakes) and crafting the perfect playlist. I spent hours and hours and hours on the music. I emailed that poor DJ about 1000 times.”

In itself, this focus tells the story.

Cathrine Mahoney at her book launch. Picture: Jonathan Ng

The shine of motherhood also soon wore off. After 10 months (“I felt very lucky I was able to spend that time with Louis, but it was also bloody hard and monotonous”), she was ready to return to work (“My job defined me, I realised”). Mahoney, it seems, didn’t “rock” at being a mother. Instead of addressing this, she felt she “needed to get back to work” (“Ah, the joys of daycare”).

When Johns again made the front pages for allegedly letting fly with a series of racial slurs against a player – these apparently included “Abo”, “black c--t”, none of which are mentioned in the book – Mahoney was “mortified”. “(T)his was next level,” she writes.

In the eye of the storm, she worried that Johns might take his own life.

Mahoney tends to focus on the impact of unfavourable publicity on her family rather than what these words revealed about her husband.

Before signing off, Mahoney has a few jabs at her errant ex-spouse – a post-divorce assignation with a beau is described as “the best sex of my life” – but, undoubtedly for legal reasons, she remains relatively restrained. (American Robin Wright delivered the same uppercut to Academy Award winner Sean Penn after their divorce by saying of a new lover, “I’ve never laughed more, read more or come more than with Ben”).

Before signing off, Mahoney has a few jabs at her errant ex-spouse.

As titles go, Currently Between Husbands is a good one. In three words, it encapsulates both its author’s market value and her market: wives, former wives, and girlfriends – preferably disgruntled – who define themselves by their partners. It also captures that uniquely prosecco-fuelled humorous brio such women use to mask what is really the despair of devaluation, and in this respect, there are no surprises in the book at all – no ambiguities, no revelations, no denouement. By the end, what comes across as heartless superficiality makes Mahoney’s devaluation feel deserved.

 Antonella Gambotto-Burke is the author of Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, out now.

Currently Between Husbands

By Cathrine Mahoney
Simon & Schuster, Memoir (of marriage)
352pp, $32.99