Split: A Memoir of Divorce

by Suzanne Finnamore

Overview

'Not only funny, it's also fully triumphant...a heartbreaking pleasure to read.'(Elle)

Suzanne Finnamore didn't see it coming. Well, she saw some things-for example, a cocktail napkin on which her husband had scribbled a Cole Porter love song and an indecipherable name-but she refused to acknowledge it. She was busy tending to their son and creating the perfect home. Until the night it all imploded. 'I deserve happiness,' he said, which apparently translated into ousting her from his life. At once funny, sad, and unflinchingly fierce, this memoir will resonate with anyone who has endured the end of a relationship-and come out on the other side changed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780451226006
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/07/2009
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Suzanne Finnamore is an author and journalist whose work has appeared in Marie Claire, O, The Oprah Magazine, Glamour, Salon, and Redbook. Her bestselling books include include Split, Crush, Otherwise Engaged, and The Zygote Chronicles. She lives in Larkspur, California.

Editorial Reviews

California journalist and author Finnamore (The Zygote Chronicles) renders a sharp, cut-to-the-quick account of her painful divorce after five years of marriage. Living in the canyons of tony Marin County with her marketing v-p husband, N, and their toddler son she calls A, the author is devastated by N's announcement that he wants a divorce-and yet she is not surprised. In brief, astute chapters riddled with a dry, deadpan humor, the author reconstructs this surreal journey from giddy romance with a suave older man (she is 40, while he is in his 50s), through motherhood and the dawning suspicions of his infidelity, to his abandonment and denial that he is involved with someone else. Finnamore enlists various characters to see her through her crisis, which spans denial and anger, grief and acceptance: her jaded, long remarried mother, Bunny, who brings the pain-killers and stocks the house with junk food; her no-nonsense diminutive friend Lisa, who remarks upon hearing the news of the divorce, "You have no idea how I have longed for this day"; and her vehemently antimarriage childhood buddy Christian. Eschewing a divorce lawyer, Finnamore manages to come through with the help of her friends and conveys in this frank, winning memoir her supreme vulnerability and bravery. (Apr.)

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Publishers Weekly

Finnamore, already an accomplished novelist (see her best-selling Otherwise Engagedand The Zygote Chronicles, a 2002 Washington PostBest Book of the Year), here easily makes the transition to creative nonfiction. She presents a treatise on an important subject in family relations-divorce, specifically, her own-describing how she learned of her ex-husband's infidelity, realized he wasn't the right man for her, struggled as a single mother, and came to terms with losing her status as a "happily married woman." Progressing through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of death and dying-denial, anger, bargaining, grief, and acceptance-she expertly creates scenes spiced with dialog to convey her emotions. One memorable moment depicts Finnamore sharpening knives by her kitchen sink as she introduces the section on anger. Good reading; recommended for public libraries.
—Dorris Douglass

Library Journal