The Messy Truth About Divorce

I married young, then had a baby, and then got divorced before anyone else I knew had even considered it. Afterward, I dated wildly and indiscriminately, and had a few nice boyfriends and one very bad one. I leaned on my friends, most of whom tried to find me handsome men in bars or wanted me to date their cute coworker because they had always wanted to but were too shy and too married. During these years I was always writing, or trying to write, or complaining about writing.

In these ways, I am like Scaachi Koul and Haley Mlotek, two fellow Canadian authors who have just released memoirs about divorce, Sucker Punch and No Fault—two of Chatelaine’s favourite books of spring 2025. I am also like them in individual ways. Like Koul, my husband was older and white and more established, with a group of friends who probably thought I was young and flaky during our marriage and who then concluded I was a duplicitous shrew when we divorced. Like Mlotek, I was very much in love with my ex-husband and the end of our marriage was indefinable, not marked by any huge betrayal; it was a break-up that could never be explained to anyone’s satisfaction.

Like them, I also wrote about the aftermath of my divorce in a memoir—a book that terrified me to publish but one that a lot of people read. Writing about that time—when everything from housing to childcare was constantly changing, when my moods were unpredictable and jumping from relief to guilt to grief every few minutes—was a halting process, filled with self-doubt. I didn’t want to write about the two most painful years of my adult life so soon after experiencing them, but writing a memoir requires a kind of radical honesty, an honesty that most of us never express once we are beyond, say, eight-years-old. Like Koul and Mlotek, I had to write about the demise of my longest relationship and I knew, as they do, that there are never any half-measures. 

Today though, I am different from Koul and Mlotek in one way: I have now been divorced for 10 years. Those emotions of grief, embarrassment and confusion are muted, if not gone entirely, and now is the right time for me to read about divorce, because I can remember it but I am no longer immersed in it and no longer writing about it. Thank god. 

For me, and many women in their 30s and 40s, the defining divorce moment of our young adulthoods is the infamous “conscious uncoupling” of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. It was, of course, an impossibly amicable and civilized affair, a divorce that was as aspirational as Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop tries to be. Their split, 10 months before mine, seemed simple and genteel, a blueprint for friendly co-parenting. When it soon became clear that my marriage would not end with affection and cooperation but with fights and accusations, I felt like a failure. Listen, I knew that Paltrow and Martin had the finances to pay for counselling and restorative holidays. I knew that neither of them had to worry about losing their home while desperately trying to understand wave after wave of conflicting emotions. I knew all of that and yet I still felt like a failure in comparison. 

For women in their 50s and 60s, divorce was defined by Eat, Pray, Love, the film that was first a memoir written by Elizabeth Gilbert, as well as How Stella Got Her Groove Back and Waiting to Exhale, novels by Terry McMillan that were both adapted for film. These stories are about triumph, about women finding their true selves among friends, and the arrival of new love as they discover their autonomy. My friends were committed and supportive, of course, but new love didn’t find me right away. For months, when the work day ended and my son was in bed, I didn’t have the energy to think about my autonomy. Instead, I scrolled through dating apps until I was groggy, sleepily wondering when the exciting post-divorce story would finally start. 

There is also very little triumph in No Fault or Sucker Punch. Instead, there is a clear embrace of the messy and amorphous—whether it’s the anger followed by deep grief that Koul writes about, or the grasping for meaning that Mlotek lives through as she tries to find her place, alone, in a new city. Koul leans on Hindu storytelling, comparing her story with the goddess Parvati, who had to prove her devotion in order to marry the “cool as all hell” Shiva. Mlotek delves deeply into the history of divorce, from how it has affected white women versus women of colour, to how it has been depicted in literature such as The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and the poems of Audre Lorde. In my book, I connected my divorce experiences to messy moments in pop culture, from the soaring, angry lyrics in Sia’s music to the rediscovery of self that Princess Diana seemed to embark on after she left Prince Charles.

Both Mlotek and Koul seem to be searching for meaning, something I understand to my core. Divorce is a gross storm of gross tasks and even grosser feelings, and none of it makes any sense, especially when it’s fresh. It’s a writerly instinct to impose a structure on it, so we might believe all that pain was for a reason. And that scaffolding we cling to could be built of anything—including a return to the religious teachings of our families or a mild obsession with how other women lived through divorce and managed to write about it, too. It could even be a compulsive and delusional habit of comparing yourself to perfect blond celebrities or, even, a princess.

Make no mistake: Sucker Punch and No Fault are very different. Koul depends on her rage and sense of humour during her marriage and in her writing. In a chapter about dating after divorce, she writes, “I derive very little pleasure from dating, but I do like telling men I’m divorced to watch them react like I’m letting them know my vagina is full of teeth.” (Same, Scaachi, same.) And she writes about the particular experience of being a rare divorcee in an immigrant family after a long conflict about marrying this older white guy in the first place. (Again: same, Scaachi, same.) Mlotek comes from a family marked by multiple divorces; in fact, her mother was a divorce mediator. Her approach is measured and laced with curiosity. Her own feelings are perhaps not the main attraction here, but rather her meditations on what divorce has historically been, and what, if anything, that means for her future.

But neither offers answers, in the way that Gilbert and McMillan seemed to (travel, make friends, find yourself and then fall in love again). Instead, they offer open endings that are tinged with hope for their single futures. It’s true that when your marriage ends, you are forced to live with yourself. The apartment smells like you alone. Only your shoes line the hallway. You order only one fried noodle and one beef with broccoli. In that silence, you might, in the most clichéd sense, find yourself and a new, perfect boyfriend who doesn’t snuff out your inner light. But it’s far more likely that you will just be you, with some old friends and new ones, living your days as they come, not fully knowing what it might mean until you try to write a book, and you see a shape and a trajectory that tricks you into believing that it all makes sense. Books can do that—and so can time.

Ten years later, my divorce isn’t top of mind. It’s probably not even in the top 20 things I worry about in a day. But still I connected viscerally with Sucker Punch and No Fault, two books that show us that triumph isn’t necessary to process the grief that divorce triggers. After all, trying to triumph over, well, anything seems like a big ask these days and none of us has the energy. Instead they show us that women can be as angry or slutty or distant as they like, that divorce is hilariously common but this doesn’t mean that each of our paths away from marriage has to be.