Ten books for tough times
My favorite stories of divorce, grief and beginning again.
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It was the summer of 2014, and my girlfriends’ romantic relationships were breaking out of the blue, one after the other. Of the five of us, three were nursing heartbreaks. A cohabitation collapsed. An engagement imploded. Then my marriage, strained by an intense year of family illness, finally snapped.
We did what girlfriends do: we pulled up chairs, opened wine, and spent long dinners railing against the injustices of fickle men. Yes, I told my two heartbroken friends, you are beautiful and brilliant and can do so much better! Breaking up with a bad boyfriend was brave. They had every right to end their relationships and walk away.
Like them, I was blindsided by my relationship breakdown and wrestling with the idea of leaving. Unlike them, I was married. Leaving was not so simple.
I was too ashamed to admit to my girlfriends that I was even considering it. I was ashamed of my rage at my husband, of failing at marriage, of the stigma of divorce. For dinner after dinner, I hid my heartbreak and struggled alone with my deep doubts: Is marriage meant to be this hard? Am I the only one who yells? Will I be blamed if I leave?
I said nothing. I stayed married for six more years.
I now know that divorce is a kind of disenfranchised grief—a loss that carries societal stigma. There are no Hallmark sympathy cards for divorce, even though it’s the most stressful life event after death. As a society, we lack rituals for complex losses like miscarriages, infertility struggles, or mental health challenges. We often don’t know how to acknowledge these situations or to show up for friends.
But silence only compounds shame and isolates us from friends who want to help. The antidote to shame is compassion: knowing that other people share our struggles can ease their sting. In the early days of my divorce journey, I found this comfort in books. Yes, they said, other people have felt this way. Other people have yelled. Other people have left. Other people have grieved and come out the other side.
It was a balm to learn that I was not alone. Eventually I began opening up to my friends and then sharing stories of my own. I am writing my way through my rebirth because I believe we need more stories of the raw, messy, beautiful parts of being human. There should be no shame in complicated loss or disenfranchised grief.
Here are ten books that kept me company on this journey and reminded me that we’re all just doing this life thing as best we can.
ON ENDING
Contemplating Divorce. How do you decide to end a marriage? The decision is so enormous and so agonizing that you can spin in uncertainty for years. This book, recommended by my therapist, gives a step-by-step guide on deciding whether to stay or go. It helped me weigh my choices from every angle, make sure I’d done my level best to make my marriage work, and come to a well-considered decision.
Splitting. I never dreamed our divorce would go to court. We had no children, fairly even assets and we’d never fought over money. I saw divorce as a painful but impartial math problem: add things up, divide in half, call it a day. But I quickly found myself in a bewildering legal world. This book, also therapist-recommended, predicted the twists and turns with uncanny accuracy and kept me sane along the way.
A Year by the Sea. In this poignant memoir, Joan Anderson spends a year alone on the coast of Maine to decide if she wants to continue in her long marriage. She unwinds the indifference in her partnership, her role as caregiver, her newfound freedom in solitude, and whether the marriage she has can support the woman she wants to become.
ON GRIEVING
Notes on Grief. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes her way through the early days of her father’s death, and vividly captures the shock of grieving deeply for the first time. “Until now, grief belonged to other people,” she writes. “You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger.” I underlined every other sentence. Yes, I thought, this is exactly what it’s like.
A Year of Magical Thinking. Joan Didion’s classic memoir on the death of her husband hit in a new way during my split. She observes her tumultuous thoughts during her first year of loss. “In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be ‘healing.’ A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days.” Spoiler alert: It doesn’t work like that.
Thirst. Mary Oliver wrote this heartbreaking collection of poems after the death of her longtime partner. In the sadness-drenched days of early divorce, I read her poem “Heavy” again and again: “That time / I thought I could not / go any closer to grief / without dying / I went closer, / and I did not die.” It reminded me that making it through the day was enough.
When Things Fall Apart. Pema Chodron became a Buddhist nun after her own marriage fell apart. Her essays offer advice on how to relax into fear and uncertainty, which is just as hard as it sounds. “Things come together and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
ON REBUILDING
The Cost of Living. Deborah Levy writes about the liminal space after divorce and rebuilding a life and identity after a long marriage. Her writing is spare and brilliant. “My marriage was a boat, and I knew that if I swam back to it, I would drown. The best thing I ever did was not to swim back to the boat. But where was I to go?”
Letters to a Young Poet. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote these letters in 1902, but they still ring true. They are musings on how to live an authentic life. “Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Live the questions for now. You will gradually live your way into the answer.”
Things to Look Forward To. During the pandemic and personal loss, illustrator Sophie Blackall felt herself losing sight of beauty and wonder and delight. She illustrated 52 everyday joys, from hugs and hot showers to rearranging furniture and drawing faces on eggs (just because you can). It charming and reminds me to appreciate the everyday beauty of the new life I’ve built.
One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. If something resonates with you, I’d love for you to leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!
Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.
Love this post ✍🏻🥰
Joan Didion, Mary Oliver and Pema Chodron: truly the medicine cabinet of the soul.