Tragicomedy of divorce
Author Arathi Menon explores the journey of dealing with and surviving divorce
On the cover of the book is the picture of a car loaded with luggage and a yellow label on its back reads: ‘ Just Divorced’. Arathi Menon has packed her bags and left a fiveyear- old marriage, and throughout the book, she tells you how she survived the worst time in her life.
Aptly, the book begins with ‘ The End’, a chapter where she talks about the reasons why a relationship ends, but not her own. She clearly points it out in the prologue that this book is not going to tell you why she got a divorce but how she survived it. It
is titled Leaving Home With Half a Fridge: A
Memoir, a tale where she splits everything in her marriage into halves and has to leave. Well, not everything, especially not a fridge. But that’s one of the many things she deals with, beginning from the day the word ‘ divorce’ pops into her head to the time she finally begins a ‘ happily ever after’ life. “It is a book that I wrote for the girl that I was five years ago,” Arathi says.
When the word popped into her head, she had no idea how to go about it. She had to start from scratch, understand the process and definitely didn’t want to go to a shrink. “No one wants a divorce but when it happens you have to know what to do and how to deal with it. In that way, this is a practical book.”
It is also not the sentimental piece you’d expect. Infact, Arathi has managed to laugh at a lot of things she went through. In one of her chapters describing her visit to a divorce lawyer whom she wanted to escape from, she writes: ‘ Luckily for me, the phone rang and I told the surprised Vodafone executive that I’d come over immediately’.
In writing her memoir, the author has come out very frankly. In another chapter she plays a stalker, going with the old spare key to her ex’s place when he was not there. But then she has written it all in the future, from what she calls a happy place. “I was talking so much about all this, when a friend of mine suggested that I must write it down.” Interestingly, the friend who recommended writing a memoir to her is her current husband.
It appeared at first as a column in a website, titled Dancing Divorcee. The popularity of the column convinced her to turn it into a book. “When I wrote the book, I thought that if it makes a difference for even one person, then it is worth it. But then so many people wrote — people going through divorce, people whose marriage was saved. My mother read it and her angst for the ex was over. The ex said I treated him better than he deserved,” she shares.
Arathi, a corporate communications professional, is now committed to being a full- time writer. Her second book, a collection of short stories, is already written and waiting for release.