Split: A Memoir of Divorce

I've just finished an interesting new book by Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce. I haven't been divorced, but it spoke to me deeply, simply as a person who has endured the heartache of failed relationships. For anyone who was actually left to mother a young child alone by her narcissitic husband, the book would probably be even more transformative.

An excerpt:

Sometime during the seasons and the years and the arguments about money and sexual positions and diapers, it became punitive, the silence. It became a void; a place I could add to and see no difference, and I had seen that and I had blinked. I had blinked and that, I see now, was the beginning of my own undoing. Because I decided that what a good wife and a new mother would do would be to correct her own faults, and simply expand to fill the space.

At this point in time it shocks me, literally sends a raw jangling nerve through my body, how wrong a person can be, to call it “Fighting for love.” Call it “Keeping the Family Together.” I mentally issues myself a dunce cap, tall and pointy.

-- Split: A Memoir of Divorce
By Suzanne Finnamore