Split: A Memoir of Divorce by Suzanne Finnamore

From the Publisher

Bestselling and award-winning author Suzanne Finnamore writes a story of divorce that is "brilliant" (Augusten Burroughs) and sure to become a classic.

There are certain books that come to epitomize their painful subject matter, offering solace to those who share the same fate and pleasure to those who merely appreciate fine writing. What The Year of Magical Thinking did for grief, what Drinking: A Love Story did for alcoholism, now Split does for divorce. Prescriptive yet full of pragmatic advice, insight and black humor, Split is a finely wrought tourniquet for a broken union and its attendant trauma.

Suzanne Finnamore, author of the novel Otherwise Engaged, didn't see it coming. Well, perhaps she saw something—for example, a cocktail napkin on which her husband, N, had scribbled a Cole Porter love song and someone else's name—but she refused to acknowledge it. She was busy tending to their one-year-old son, then applying makeup, donning high heels, and mixing a martini to greet N with when he arrived home at night. Until the night N came home, told her she looked beautiful, changed his clothes, and announced that he was leaving.

In crystalline, riveting prose, Finnamore tells the story of her divorce, and her marriage, and how it all imploded and came back together, changed. At once quite funny, achingly sad, and unflinchingly fierce, Split will resonate with anyone who's endured the end of a relationship.

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Dorris Douglass - Library Journal

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.

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