One of my lines in my book was, “Dr. Phil, It’s Your Girl” when I was sarcastically calling out for help. And hey, it’s true, sometimes we just need to bask in some form of self-help. If you can’t afford therapy or reading is an addition, this book can help you address feelings you may have parallel to Dr. Phil and the specific days he talks about. Some you may have experienced (like divorce) and others may not have occurred yet. This was a mini therapeutic dive for me and helped me with perspective in various situations.

One of the most beautiful books I’ve read. Robert Stone, another one of my favorite writers, said that “[t]here’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’
By this metric, Salter’s Light Years is one of the most striking works of art I’ve encountered. Read it. This book captures how life, time, landscapes, inner lives, people, perceptions, and relationships move and change. Salter may be my new favorite writer.

Here are a few passages, among many, that stood out:

“The present is powerful. Memories fade.”

“In the turning of seasons, they would be green again, these great trees. . . They would again, in addition to their beauty, to the roof they made beneath… show more.

Collaborative Divorce is not new, it has been around since the mid-1990s. It is an alternative to litigation when mediation is not going to be enough support. The core of the approach is respect, honesty, transparency, and concern for the entire family. Mediation and Collaborative Divorce are both confidential processes that avoid litigation but there are significant advantages to Collaborative Divorce. Mediation is with one neutral facilitator (mediator) but in a Collaborative Divorce, each person has their own specially trained attorney to guide them through the divorce. In addition, each person has their own divorce coach (sometimes just one neutral coach), and often a child specialist brings the voice of the children to the negotiations. This book describes how Collaborative Divorce works and will help readers decided whether this would be a good process choice for them. The goal is to help families avoid court and avoid ongoing conflict. The… show more.

Juliet Barker’s monumental biography, The Brontes (Abacus), certainly falls into the category of the tried and tested which will not let you down. A fiercely revisionist, meticulously researched reassessment of the background, landscape, and events that shaped and formed Patrick, Charlotte, Emily, Branwell, and Anne, it breathes fresh air and common sense into the dark myths and fantasies which envelop the sisters in particular. I love it for the hard work that the author invested in it, her detail, her scrupulous integrity, and her determination to get at the truth about the individuals and the family as a whole. She argues well and powerfully that "without this intense family relationship, some of the greatest novels in the English language might never have been written."

I’m recommending this book because it made me cry, and I don’t cry. The warped triangle between two divorced parents and their daughter is tragic enough, but what really stirred me was the way Willow so fiercely wants to live life with her “fun” mom, not really understanding that not everything in life is as it seems.

I love authors who think for themselves. People who look at the state of the world, question the status quo, and wonder how to make things just a little bit better. Constance Ahrons was one of these women, and for this reason, she’s a hero of mine.

While conscious divorce is finally coming into vogue, she was the one who pioneered the idea back in the early 90s. The research she did on the impact a bad divorce had on kids was unprecedented and radical for that time.

As someone who divorced my daughter’s father when she was still young, I found that this book provided a practical roadmap on how to do this well that is still highly relevant today. 

An early novella of mine has the indignant heroine rushing to save a woman from a wife sale at a seedy inn. The enormous cost of legally ending a marriage in the Regency put divorce out of the reach of all but the very wealthy. For the poor, and perhaps the drunks, like Thomas Hardy’s hero in The Mayor of Casterbridge, there was another option for ending a marriage, one with a long though not very respectable tradition. Yes, some Englishmen sold their wives! This book covers the peculiarities of this poor man’s method of ending an unhappy marriage. 

Do you like some romance with your murder mystery? Then you will love Getting Rid of Bradley by Jennifer Crusie. Better known for her many bestselling romantic comedies, twice RITA winner Crusie had been writing laugh out loud love scenes for years before she turned to murder mystery. And boy does it show!

The pace is lightning fast, the dialogue a delight, the snazzy sister talk and keep your hair on cop talk metamorphose swiftly into a laugh-a-minute embezzlement and attempted murder romp. Does true love win? Ask Jake or Lucy. Or perhaps Lucy’s sister Tina, who will always take the opposite view. A well-plotted story that satisfies yet still leaves you wanting more!

The way Rey handles butch-femme relationships never fail to impress me, and I think so much of it comes down to how expertly she manages to make her butch characters so non-toxic in their masculinity. They support without taking over, lead without diminishing, and her characters are so often imperfectly doing their best that you root for them even when you know they’re about to do something they’ll regret. Twice Shy puts two women together who’ve both divorced their exes, and listening to Kiera Grace perform Quinn and Amanda tentatively finding their way to each other was as sweet as Amanda’s bakery’s cupcakes. Oh, I should warn you, though: any Rey book will make you hungry. Bring snacks.

You might not think about Sparks as a go-to for sweeping countryside settings… and yet his treatment of the North Carolina lends itself so sweetly to this romance, that I bet the story wouldn’t be the same without it. There is something so sexy about a handsome man in blue jeans ambling down a country lane.