Yes Please (11 page)

my books on divorce

I
UNDERSTAND WHY PEOPLE READ SO MANY BOOKS ON DIVORCE
.
When you are a person going through a divorce you feel incredibly alone, yet you are constantly reminded by society of how frequently divorce happens and how common it has become. You aren’t allowed to feel special, but no one understands the specific ways you are in pain. Imagine spreading everything you care about on a blanket and then tossing the whole thing up in the air. The process of divorce is about loading up that blanket, throwing it up, watching it all spin, and worrying what stuff will break when it lands. It’s no wonder we want to find answers and comfort.

I don’t want to talk about my divorce because it is too sad and too personal. I also don’t like people knowing my shit. I will say a few things. I am proud of how my ex-husband, Will, and I have been taking care of our children; I am beyond grateful he is their father; and I don’t think a ten-year marriage constitutes failure. That being said, getting a divorce really sucks. But as my dear friend and relationship sponsor Louis CK has noted, “divorce is always good news because no good marriage has ever ended in divorce.”

Any painful experience makes you see things differently. It also reminds you of the simple truths that we purposely forget every day or else we would never get out of bed. Things like, nothing lasts forever and relationships can end. The best that can happen is you learn a little more about what you can handle and you stay soft through the pain. Perhaps you feel a little wiser. Maybe your experience can be of help to others. With that in mind, here are some titles for a series of divorce books I would like to pitch to you and my editors for future discussion. After review, I realize that all of my books have exclamation points at the end of their titles, but I think people want exclamation points in the titles of their books and I don’t think I am wrong!!!!

1.

I WANT A DIVORCE! SEE YOU TOMORROW!

If you have small children you will understand this book. This book deals with the fact that most people who divorce with small children still need to see each other every day. Any good parent will try to put their children’s needs first, and so this book will help teach you how to have a knock-down, drag-out fight and still attend a kid’s birthday party together on the same day. Are you in your early twenties and recently broke up with someone over Skype? This book is not for you. Have you successfully avoided your ex for over six months except for a close call at your friends’ art opening? This book is not for you. Have you heard secondhand that your ex is building houses for Habitat for Humanity and you rolled your eyes at how fucking phony the whole thing sounded and then sighed because you don’t miss him but you liked playing with his dog? This book is not for you. This book is for the people who have to work together or live together or co-parent together while going through a divorce.

Chapters include:

•  FAKE SMILING

•  HOW IMPORTANT IS THE LAST WORD?

•  PHONE CALLS ON THE WAY HOME FROM THERAPY

•  EVERYONE NEEDS TO STOP BUYING TOYS

2.

GET OVER IT! (BUT NOT TOO FAST!)

When you are going through the trauma and drama of divorce, you learn who your real friends are. They guide you and take care of you and save you from your darkest days. The problem is, you also have to talk to other people about this bullshit, and it’s often people you don’t care about or like. Usually these people are very interested at first and then have to go back to their own lives and want you to do the same. This book is here to remind you that even though you are in pain and still in transition, everyone else has moved on and is a little tired of your situation. This book will remind you that unless you and your ex-spouse got into a juicy fight or there are some new boyfriends and girlfriends in the mix, most people don’t want to talk about it anymore. This book will also teach you how you need to move on, but not too fast. It will remind you that you are allowed to be upset, but for god’s sake please keep it together. You need to seem sad at just the right times or else other people will think you’re weird. You also need to be able to act normal at the parties they invite you to.

Chapters include:

•  SHE DOESN’T CRY ENOUGH

•  HE SEEMS GAY TO ME

•  THIS WON’T GET YOU OUT OF A SPEEDING TICKET

•  I’M SORRY TO INTERRUPT, BUT WHEN DO YOU THINK YOU WILL BE OVER IT?

3.

DIVORCE: TEN WAYS TO NOT CATCH IT!

Divorce is contagious! Haven’t you heard? It’s like cancer but worse because no one really feels that bad for you. This book will teach you how to discuss your divorce with your currently married friends. Some married couples get freaked out when you talk about your divorce and like to tell you how they aren’t going to get one. Usually they point to their hard work through therapy, their fear of being alone, or their total acceptance of a dead marriage devoid of sex and love. This book will help you not strangle them when they both stand in front of you and talk about how great their relationship continues to be. This book will also help you deal with the divorce voyeur, the friend who wants to hear every detail and live vicariously through your experience. This book will point to ways you can talk about your divorce without feeling like it’s a fancy fur coat that people like to try on but then throw back at you in disgust because they would never wear something so vile. This book contains illustrations of happy couples looking at you with pity, and some weird aphorisms that intimate it’s somehow easier to get divorced than to stay in an unhappy marriage.

Chapters include:

•  DIVORCE IS NOT AN OPTION FOR ME, BUT I AM HAPPY FOR YOU

•  C’MON, WHO HASN’T CHEATED?

•  I JUST COULDN’T DO THAT TO MY KIDS

•  MAYBE YOU GUYS JUST NEED TO GO TO OJAI FOR A WEEKEND

4.

HEY, LADY, I DON’T WANT TO FUCK YOUR HUSBAND!

Newly divorced and attending a wedding for the first time alone? This book is for you! Inside you will find ways to deal with the strange stares and drunk accusations that come along with not having a date. You will find tips on how to gently break it to women that you don’t want to fuck their flabby baby-faced husbands. You will find pointers on how to deflect advances made by their husbands in full view of the wives so you don’t have to get involved in other people’s weird relationship shit. You will read about the experiences of other men and women who bravely attended events without a plus-one and came out alive. Check out our special section on what to do when friends try to awkwardly set you up, and our newly added bonus chapter dedicated to those who want to be gay for a weekend.

Chapters include:

•  NO ONE AS GREAT AS YOU SHOULD BE SINGLE

•  IS IT HARD TO BE AT A WEDDING?

•  YOU’VE NEVER LOOKED BETTER

•  HAVE YOU SEEN MARK ANYWHERE? I CAN’T FIND HIM

5.

GOD IS IN THE DETAILS!

This book will help you navigate all the intimate details that people want to know and, frankly, have a right to know. This includes how did you break up and where you are living now and who wanted it more and how long did you know and what is going on with the kids and how did you tell the kids and was it sad and is he mad and are you sad and does everyone know and who have you told and who can I tell and when will you make an announcement and does Margaret know and is it okay for me to call her and what’s going on with the house and who is getting the money and how much money is it, exactly, and does Margaret know because I feel like she needs to hear it from me and do you have a boyfriend and does he have a girlfriend and what are their names and how much do they weigh and are weekends lonely and are you happier and do you think you will ever get married again and are you going to have more kids and could you just tell me exactly every detail from the beginning especially the bad stuff?

6.

THE HOLIDAYS ARE RUINED
!

This book is one page long and just contains that one sentence.

My hope is these manuals will help you navigate such a supremely shitty time. I promise you, someday happy couples won’t make you cry anymore. Someday you may be in one again. Someday you will wake up feeling 51 percent happy and slowly, molecule by molecule, you will feel like yourself again. Or you will lose your mind and turn into a crazy person. Either way, let’s just hope you avoided tattoos, because most are pretty stupid anyway.

talk to yourself like you’re ninety

I
SUPPOSE I AM PRE-PERI-MIDDLE-AGED
.
At forty-three, I feel right in the middle. I am no spring chicken but I am not an old lady. I know the names of all the members of Odd Future but I didn’t have the Internet in college. I can party like a twenty-year-old but it takes me almost a week to recover. Sometimes I am a tired mother taking her kids to the park, and other times I am a petulant teenager giving the finger to a speeding FedEx truck. I idle right in the middle.

I don’t know when middle age starts, exactly. According to my current edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary,
middle age is “the period of life between young adulthood and old age, now usually regarded as between about forty-five and sixty.” Sixty? Nice try,
Oxford
.

I think middle age begins once you start looking forward to eating dinner before six thirty, or when you call the cops when your next-door neighbor has a party. I know my body feels older. I recently hurt myself on a treadmill and it wasn’t even on. I was adjusting my speed and stepped wrong and twisted my ankle. I felt a moment of frustration filled with immediate relief. I didn’t have to actually work out, but I still got credit for trying. It was a gym snow day. You know those exercise pools where the water comes at you strong and you have to swim against it to build up your strength? That’s what the social pressure of staying young feels like. You can either exhaust yourself thrashing against it or turn around and let the pressure of it massage out your kinks. Fighting aging is like the War on Drugs. It’s expensive, does more harm than good, and has been proven to never end.

Hopefully I have another forty to fifty years of living ahead of me before I pass from this earth either in my sleep or during a daring rescue caught on tape. Ideally my penultimate day would be spent attending a giant beach party thrown in my honor. Everyone would gather around me at sunset, and the golden light would make my skin and hair beautiful as I told hilarious stories and gave away my extensive collection of moon art to my ex-lovers. I and all of my still-alive friends (which, let’s face it, will mostly be women) would sing and dance late into the night. My sons would be grown and happy. I would be frail but adorable. I would still have my own teeth, and I would be tended to by handsome and kind gay men who pruned me like a bonsai tree. Once the party ended, everyone would fall asleep except for me. I would spend the rest of the night watching the stars under a nice blanket my granddaughter made with her Knit-Bot 5000. As the sun began to rise, an unexpected guest would wake and put the coffee on. My last words would be something banal and beautiful. “Are you warm enough?” my guest would ask. “Just right,” I would answer. My funeral would be huge but incredibly intimate. I would instruct people to throw firecrackers on my funeral pyre and play
Purple Rain
on a loop.