Split: A Memoir of Divorce by Suzanne Finnamore

I read 42 books, six of which were memoirs of divorce, when I was going through it. I read when I didn’t know what to do, hoping that I would find answers to questions about my life in someone else’s wisdom. My list of memoirs became a handout in my divorce group therapy meetings. This is how Divorceramics came to be. Of all of the books I read while I was going through the experience of being left, this is the one that perhaps made the biggest impact on me.

“I had saved everything. I quite objectively judge myself a fool, an idiot, an imbecile, a sop, a dolt, a tacky bovine cow-figurine-woman who saved everything, while N sashayed off, without a single memory or photograph, glad to be rid of it all, glad to be rid of me. And sweet lil’ organized me, with everything packed nicely in boxes, waiting for what? For the future, I had thought. For our old age, I’d thought.”

In the following scene, Suzanne Finnamore takes everything that she had so carefully saved, and lights it on fire in her kettle BBQ one night. This was so powerful a passage that I did it myself. Her memoir is just that powerful. It is also so well-written, vulnerable, and witty, as she journeys from denial through the panic and lurches toward a “simple contentment.”