“When we let tensions fester, or allow familiarity to pass for understanding, we tend to leave parts of ourselves out of our most important relationships. We miss out on the opportunity to continue to grow. We lose track of who we want to be, and we can’t share our full selves with those we love.”

“Still, Plath had published much more than Hughes, and may have been surprised to find herself the trailing spouse. … In the wake of Ted’s triumph, she worried about carrying even more of the household burden. Now all her blithe talk about ‘Books & Babies & Beef stews’ seemed terribly naive as she saw her future as a series of ‘domestic chores’ that had, throughout history, prevented all but the wealthiest women from fulfilling their creative potential. She resented having ‘3 jobs—writing, cooking & housekeeping’ and vowed to ‘have children only after I have a poetry book & a novel published, so my children fit into my work routine & don’t overthrow mine with theirs.’ Yet in her journal she worried that she would simply give up, ‘escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter.’ She likely doubted that she could ask her husband to share those chores now that he was famous. If she did not win an equally prestigious prize—and soon—she would never reclaim her poetic equity within the marriage.”

“We have a choice in how we tell our life story. We do not write it in permanent ink. There are no points for consistency, or even accuracy. We can change it at any time, for any reason, including one as simple as making ourselves feel better. After all, a primary function of our life story is to allow us to place experiences firmly in the past and take from them something beneficial that will allow us to thrive in the future. Only when that happens will we know our transition is complete.”

“That night, the bottom fell out of my solar plexus, and it would remain somewhere south of normal for a long, long time. He still loved me, he said at first. We stayed together for two more hard years. I still wasn’t ready to give us up. By the morning my husband rollered out the back door for good, a small part of me wanted him to go, but a much bigger part of me didn’t. My heart was still in it, which is how a heart comes to be broken. Our hearts had been beating together, side by side, through my entire adulthood, and then they weren’t.”

“Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done. Betrayal is neat because no matter what else happened—if you argued about work or the kids, if you lacked intimacy, if you were disconnected and lonely—it’s as if that person doused everything with lighter fluid and threw a match. Sometimes I wonder: If there had been no postcard, no notebook, would our marriage have survived? I don’t know. That’s the truth.”

“The thoughts that race around my head the most are about growing old alone. I don’t regret my divorce, but I would like a life partner. It’s hard having to re-create yourself in your forties. You have days that you feel great and days where you feel like the wind has been knocked out of you. In a relationship there’s an illusion that you’re not alone. After a separation or a divorce, that illusion isn’t there anymore.”

“When they sat beside me, my hand in their hands, my own suffering began to feel like it had revealed to me the suffering of others, a world of those who, like me, are stumbling in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made.”

“Along the way something magical happened. I came to believe that I created my divorce so that I could experience a much richer life. A life I couldn’t have dreamed because I couldn’t possibly deserve something so spectacular.”

“I walk around the jailhouse and smoke a cigarette. I don’t know what I can do to stop this pain in me. I can’t imagine how I am supposed to live.”

“And I learned the hard way that to nullify yourself means that when you most need yourself, you may not even know who you are. I had made choices, and now I was seeing the consequences. It’s taken three very painful years to learn lessons I would rather not have had to learn. But I have learned my worth. And I will never again settle for less.”

“Every morning in the shower now, I sink to the floor and cry, a silent animal cry, my mouth gaping open and my body hunched forward and when a sound finally comes out, it does not sound human.”

“But for a stay-at-home mom, divorce isn’t just divorce. It’s more like divorce plus losing your job. The job I once had — stay-at-home mom-slash-dilettante-writer — no longer exists.”

“Clearly, Rachel didn’t want to be vulnerable, which is exactly what speaking honestly with her boyfriend would require. She felt ill-equipped to ask him why he would drop out of sight for days or weeks and then reappear as if nothing happened. So, in essence, she was saving herself from the pain of facing her feelings of being unimportant or discarded. My sense was that this pain mirrored the unexplored pain of her childhood. Relegating her own needs to the sideline had ensured security and love in the dysfunctional dialect of her family’s language. However, in adulthood, abandoning herself had become a massive obstacle to her well-being and happiness.”