BEST BOOKS FOR... SURVIVING DIVORCE
THE author and broadcaster suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life FOR ANYONE going through a marriage break-up, novels can be an invaluable road map. When my parents divorced 50-odd years ago, it was still considered a shocking thing to do, especially when, as in my mother’s case, it was the woman who left her family behind.
Divorce is almost the norm now, but when Nancy Mitford wrote her wise and funny novel The Pursuit Of Love, the fact that her heroine, the charming but chronically romantic Linda Radlett, leaves not one but two husbands and her child puts her beyond the pale in polite society.
What makes this book invaluable to anyone going through a marriage break-up is not only its wit and briskness, which act as a tonic for even the most severe case of self-pity, but also its surprisingly modern conclusion (it was published in 1945) when Linda finds love but not marriage in the arms of a French aristocrat.
Less romantic, but more familiar is Rose, the 48-year-old heroine of Revenge Of The Middle-Aged Woman by Elizabeth Buchan, whose husband Nathan walks out on their seemingly perfect marriage for a younger woman.
The best revenge, of course, is living well, and this is what Rose, after a painful period of drinking too much and eating too little, succeeds in doing. Definitely the book to read if divorce has left you feeling invisible and without status.
Buchan’s book is wry and witty, but the funniest book written about the end of a marriage has to be Heartburn by the late, great Nora Ephron.
Based on the break-up of Ephron’s own marriage to the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, it is a hilarious, painful account of what happens when cookery writer Rachel Samstat discovers her husband is having an affair with one of her friends when she is seven months pregnant.
Rachel realises her friend, who is also married, is seeing someone when she finds out she is having her legs waxed in winter, little knowing it is her husband with whom her friend is sleeping.
No matter how sad you are, I guarantee this book will make you smile, and it also contains the best-ever recipe for key lime pie, which you can either comfort eat, or — like Rachel — press into the face of your erring spouse. This book should come free with a decree nisi.