Falling apart in one piece
Book Review
By Stacy Morrison
Copyright 2010, Simon & Schuster
I know I look like a crazy person when I read this book. The entire time my head was nodding up and down and up and down. So much so that now and again the words get blurry and I blurt an “I know!” into the silence around me. You instantly get her. You know Stacy, you don't know exactly how or from where, but you know her. Her writing is so conversational, so honest and her story is all to familiar. Either we, or someone we know, has gone through divorce, job loss, job changes and the ensuing identity crisis that follows.
As relentless as she is with “Why” during her soul searching she is generous is sharing all of the bits and pieces of answers that moved her through the why me, and into the what next. She openly ponders about where and when a marriage splinters, unnoticeably but irrepairably. She brings us to the reality of the inevitable, eventual collapse in a way that offers the reader closure.
Where she loses me is in Polly Anna statements like this: “This was not the saddest in my life. In face, in a weird twist that I have now come to expect in my day-to-day, it was one of the happiest.” as she is walking out of the court room. I understand her point as feeling relief, momentum and lighter, but it’s sentences like that that irk me as a reader who has just spent a few hundred pages empathizing with her. But maybe that is her point. That eventually there is light at the end of the tunnel and it is possible to not collapse in a heap of despair at the end.
I won't give away the ending but will say I concluded this book with an initial burst of optimism that further perpetuates this notion that divorced people are not fully "okay" until they are in another relationship. Why can't a heronine just be happy being strong even if that means being alone?
Recommendation: 3 out 5 stars. While I found it entirely readable and relatable I didn't leave the pages with much to build on. There weren't any life lessons or take-aways that stick with me.
