How Reading Helped Me Through My Divorce

With a good book, you’ll never be lonely

I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through it. But I knew I had to; I didn’t have a choice.

When I decided to get divorced at age thirty-eight, as the mother of four young kids, including a nine-month-old baby, I did so because I couldn’t not. I did so, fundamentally, to save my soul.

I don’t blame my ex-husband. The ins and outs of our relationship are probably familiar to many and largely irrelevant, for reasons hard to articulate yet easy to feel.

The fallout from our separation left me pushing a stroller up and down Madison Avenue, racing across town to school pick-ups, suddenly unsupported by friends I thought would always be there for me, suddenly in conflict with my closest loved ones, suddenly in a life I hadn’t imagined. My old, parallel existence was thrown in sharp relief — what it would’ve looked like had I not made this ground-splitting decision. But the new world I’d just entered was still murky. And yet, under the door that was cracked open, I could see the tiniest bit of light shining through. I kept racing towards it.

The hardest part — there were and continue to be many, many hard parts — was having to share my kids, having to drop them off with my ex-husband for long weekends bimonthly…