#divorce fiction

[divorce-fiction]

The Forgetting by Hannah Beckerman

Opening Tally

Marriages: 2 Divorces: 0

The Forgetting feels like an odd book, when you first pick it up. The story is set in England, so I found myself, as an American reader, googling things like 'lorry' (semi-truck) and making sure that yes, they do indeed spell "curb" as "kerb". There's also the distinct choice of writing one protagonist in First Person POV and the other in Third, but this wasn’t the first time I'd encountered a book with this writing choice, so I rolled on. Some chapters are so short that they feel unnecessary, to the point of quite literally being the front and back of a page. Even when we were down to the final confrontation between one woman and her husband there were still so-called chapter breaks interrupting this linear conversation in a park.

Livvy is a new mom on her LEGALLY MANDATED YEAR OF MATERNITY LEAVE (screaming that part loudly for the Americans to have their minds blown). Her husband, Dominic, is a freelance contractor whose current schedule only allows him home on the weekends. She's eager to get back to work and has good relationships with her sister and parents, who all live in Bristol close to her.

Anna is an amnesiac. She has just woken up in a London hospital with no memory of her life and especially no memory of Stephen, who introduces himself as her husband of 12 years and has to leave town on weekends for work. Over the course of the story and her recovery you learn she has no family (only child, her parents died), no friends (withdrew from social life after losing her job), and no children (she and Stephen were infertile).

Or.....wait no that's not true, because she finds pictures of her with a baby. Stephen lied, to protect her! And oh wait, she didn't lose her job as a librarian because of budget cuts, she left it after being depressed by the loss of the baby.

As for Dominic, you get the early sense that he's too good to be true: a gentleman who stepped up to the plate after an accidental pregnancy and has nothing but love in his heart for his new family, an adult replacement for the family he says abused him in childhood.

I won’t bury the lede: This is a slowburn domestic abuse story. Nothing feels too abnormal, too outside the bounds of common marital strife. Yes, couples sometimes lie to each other. Yes, couples can have different ideas of what their perfect family looks like. Yes, couples can have arguments that get heated. But it's the slow creep of toxicity that gives this story its tension. You ask yourself if YOU are susceptible to the same things Anna and Livvy begin to resign themselves to living with: lies and manipulation and browbeating and negging and isolation and, eventually, physical violence. This is a horror novel where you're screaming at the women to get out of there, RUN! But the boogeyman isn't under their bed-- he's in it.

The small details pileup overtime like grains of sand in an hourglass: white flowers, special nicknames, platinum wedding rings, short hair, classical music (Schubert, The Trout Quintet). It's not an instantaneous reveal but a slow peel, the revelation that Stephen and Dominic are the same man. His work trips align so that he can be in Bristol for the weekend with his wife and child, and London during the week with his other wife. He even has Livvy's love letters hidden in a box in the attic. A bigamist, that most foul of liars.

It is not a peel but a cacophonous crash, to discover Anna and Livvy are also the same woman.

Livvy's third-person chapters are told concurrently, but all happened in the past. Anna's first-person chapters are the present and tainted with the garbage heap of lies her husband has fed her since the car accident, a road rage incident that he caused. It's smart, a twist I've seen before, but can't say I saw coming. Bravo, Beckerman. There is a bit of nonsense about middle names as first names, relayed clumsily in the prologue to explain the Anna/Livvy, Dominic/Stephen switch, but I can see why the explanation was built in to undercut any discussion of "plotholes".

This book clocks in at over 300 pages, and there's definitely some points where the pacing could have been picked up and moved things along faster. Chop 50 pages out of it and you’d have a much tighter story.

I enjoyed reading this, but won’t be picking up any of her other works. The novel lived up to its name and I forgot about it immediately after reading. There’s also the matter of JK Rowling's transphobia running rampant in the UK, and I find it hard to trust English artists who have made no definitive statements about trans rights. I recommend picking this one up at a library if you can, and if you can forgive me for spoiling the book’s twist.

Livvy/Anna gets a restraining order against Dominic/Stephen, with the implication that she will be filing for divorce soon after.

Closing Tally

Marriages: 1 Divorces: 0 (technically) Restraining Orders: 1

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

[bloominglegumes]

i love normal guys doomed by the narrative

[dont-tell-my-mom-im-here]

I keep seeing GO fics in which they use miracles for sex, which is nice y'know, love the creativity, but like, Heaven and Hell can see what they use miracles for right? So I just keep picturing like Michael or someone getting a notification and it's just like:

[AZIRAPHALE] removed Crowley's clothes

[AZIRAPHALE] miracled (1) penis

I mean no wonder they wanted to break them up.

[beerok23]

Mandatory things you find in a proper Good Omens AU Fan Fic

Crowley being mesmerized by Aziraphale at first sight.

Absence or lack of communication that leads to crisis before a sappy resolution.

They are in love with each other and they both think the other can't be in love with them.

Shifting POVs to remind us that they both are idiots.

Aziraphale having problems with his appearance (for lack of self-confidence or induced by others) and Crowley managing to reassure Aziraphale for said insecurities.

Crowley inner thoughts being the funniest thing you'll ever read in your life.

The origin of the "Angel" nickname.

Wine, lots of wine.

Ngk. Ngk is always there - Neil and Terry's fault, because it's from the book, obviously.

Azi's manicured hands. Again, if you haven't read the book, I think you should.

Crowley's limbs or hips not being attached to his body when he walks.

Whatever their AU job is, you always have Crowley in love with plants and Aziraphale living for his books. The bookshop is a constant. The plants are always yelled at.

Stars ⭐️ 🌟 Crowley always loves Stars.

Aziraphale moaning while eating. That is a must have. Also, Crowley is never a great eater, but he loves coffee.

Crowley being or acting like a slut (that's not mandatory, sometimes he's just gorgeous).

A supportive friend on both side (Anathema, Muriel, Maggie, Nina, Tracy...).

Anathema and Newt always being a couple - which is great, because it shows how NOT tossic this fandom is, we all want the canon couples to be happy canon couples.

Gabriel being a dick (former lover, actual lover, older brother, villain...).

Very talkative sex :)

A happy ending - because we can't imagine a world where these two idiots don't end up together.

[rodentjazz]

Tarot cards based my Lunadeyis and Aster designs

[justarandombrit]

Owen "Spent four years pretending to be dead, whilst secretly concocting an elaborate plot to take revenge on his ex boyfriend by gradually dismantling every principal he has ever believed in, thus making his entire life purpose obsolete" Carvour: Here's some advice, Curt. It's called moving on.

[thepriceofsurvival]

[anotherbummer]

Aubrey Thyme, professional psychotherapist, after hearing what happened to Crowley at the end of season 2:

[windemere-wicklow]

If i had every nickel my heroine-villain ship wore black and white like it’s their wedding

I’d had two. It’s not much but it’s weird it happened twice.

(Right Image from saurondrielz tumblr)

[pineappical]

father and son

[atti-rambles]

i can't BELIEVE dungeon meshi is making me think about a divorced man... what fiction does to a lesbian with father issues... i need to go to a bar with that guy, i NEED to call his ass old as hell okay

he is the older coworker like 2 times older than me i bitch about customers with okay. i literally thrive in those relationships. i NEED to get advice from him while i slowly decrypt his vague mentions of his live.

[divorce-fiction]

A Fire So Wild by Sarah Ruiz-Grossman

Opening Tally

Marriages: 2 Divorces: 1

If I had a nickel for every piece of media I’ve consumed that had an snooty Jewish mother named Naomi in it I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. ((all my love to 'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend'))

Climate Fiction's newest entrant, A Fire So Wild, has its heart in the right place and its words in all the wrong ones. The few positives (evocative descriptions, diverse characters, normalized queerness) do little salvage a story that feels like it was meant to be a shared universe anthology. The few characters whose endings seem hopeful are still saturated with despair, and the book's message is unfortunately, inevitably "There is no light at the end of these tunnels".

There’s a noticeable awkwardness to Ruiz-Grossman’s style of writing. Her sentence structures and noun usage is repetitive. Cliches are dropped almost like placeholders into otherwise well-crafted scenes (“As Xavier walked off, his jeans hugged his legs in all the right places.”). An attempt at building tension draws a reader's gaze to the cast's empty gas tank, but her foreshadowing is clumsy and thus overly obvious. It's a bumpy drive on a beautiful road with unavoidable potholes.

The main characters, defined here as anyone (8!) with a POV, suffer from a lack of time. Each character gets the in media res scene, the sad backstory, and then they fade into the ensemble until the big event (the fire!) which inspires their lifestyle change. It’s a tiring setup with a generic payoff for every single character. Those 8 include: Mar (high school senior) and both of her parents, Camila and Gabriel, Xavier (high school senior) and his moms, Abigail and Taylor, and Sunny and his wife, Willow.

The characters are incredibly diverse, a obvious plus! But the mixed-race lesbians, cross-cultural South Americans, indigenous alt-girl, homeless Asian man, and more suffer from the leftist writer curse of tokenism. The nonbinary shelter volunteer isn't a character, but a flat plot device who feels kept around for the sole purpose of having they/them pronouns checked off the Marginalized Communities list. I want so badly to read about these people and their inner worlds, but they need to be more than cardboard cutouts to tape labels and trauma to.

Speaking of trauma: Willow. A runaway who's all grownup, living in a van with her husband Sunny and their dog Aso, she is the severely depressed girl with PTSD and nothing more. Her sections are only ever about how her trauma was bad and that makes her life bad. And I really do feel for this character! She went through a harrowing sexual assault at the hands of her stepfather and was never given the resources to properly recover from it. But……..she’s also been with her husband for over a decade, since they were teenagers, and has never once told him about it. The guy she refers to multiple times as her reason for living. There's a shallowness to her that renders the whole character irritating. What does she want? What does she believe in? What else does she remember from her life? Trauma does terrible things to a person and it affects everyone differently, but Willow is JUST her trauma.

There’s also a section that jumps very quickly from Willow running through a forest fire (and thinking about her trauma) to Mar hooking up with Xavier. It’s tonal whiplash hell as both events are described with the SAME LANGUAGE, specifically noting how Mar enjoys being “smothered” by her hot boyfriend as opposed to Willow being “smothered” by her rapist. Maybe this wasn’t intentional, maybe the author is trying to draw some kind of parallel. But it was gross when it didn't need to be.

Willow dies in the forest fire, by the way. She lays down, thinks about how traumatized she is, and lets herself burn alive. There is no catharsis here, the most crucial part of a tragedy. It's pornographic hopelessness, and it's pointless.

A knock to my particular copy of the book: some pages didn’t print properly, so one side would have very thin, hard to read lettering while the next page looked entirely bolded. It was annoying to read, especially in low light, but that's the fault of the printer, not the author.

This book is weak. Its main sin was trying to do too much with too little: too much soapboxing, too little characterization. Besides Sunny, a bright spot in the lackluster lineup, there is almost no depth to the characters beyond their assigned social justice crisis. A Fire So Wild wants to be about homelessness and climate change and classism and trauma and depression and recovery and growing up and choosing yourself and natural disasters and grief and cycles and systemic disenfranchisement, but there isn’t any time with 8 protagonists and only 196 pages to be about those things. And so it ends up being about……nothing at all.

Abigail and Taylor get divorced after their son leaves home.

Camila and Gabriel stay divorced, though friendly.

Sunny grieves Willow's death and begins the groundwork for a youth shelter.

Mar and Xavier breakup as Mar goes to college and Xavier joins a group of climate activists.

Closing Tally

Marriages: 0 Divorces: 2 Widowers: 1

Rating: ★✮☆☆☆ (1.5/5)

[bethanydelleman]

Talking to a friend today about how long polygamy lasted in China and I thought, "Huh, that seems like a really long time" (not officially ended until 1940s) but then I had a second thought, "Marriage was really locked in for a long time in England/most of Europe" and maybe that is the stranger thing. Divorce was nearly impossible and polygamy was illegal for a very long time, meaning that death was the only release from marriage. And I guess a lot of people died early, but that still seems wild. Make one decision in your early twenties and then you have to live with it essentially forever.

Then I started thinking to myself, alternative history where polygamy was normal and Henry VIII married all his wives at once. Would that make things better or worse?

[bread-bastard]

Walk Mary Home side route my beloved (featuring my dadsona Antonio!) Mary needs more love in this fandom fr 🤍

[tismrot]

Good Omens dystopian sci-fi romance, wahoo!

[START HERE]

SUMMARY

Recent developments suggest sci-fi nerds are really into this fic, which I absolutely love, of course. So, if you’re the kind of person who likes Good Omens, but also dystopian futures and literal tech wizards - as well as sweet romance with a cherry on top - maybe you’ll like this?

And if you read it, let me know, because I love meeting new people who like the same stuff as me❤️ …And attention❤️

[chemicallywrit]

Happy Audio Drama Sunday! This week I was on vacation and let me tell you. It was glorious. So I had plenty of time to enjoy this week’s offerings! Let’s goooooo

🥸 @worldgonewrongpod is always a huge treat, and this week committed so hard to the true meaning of friendship: making your way through the apocalypse together. I am so pleased they’re doing a second season. I am also. VERY worried about the alien doppelgänger Malik has decided to be friendly with. Why would he DO that.

📖 I haven’t talked about @wanderersjournalpod yet, but i have been listening, and this last episode established STAKES. It’s such a unique conceit, this shared journal between two very distant people, and the helplessness Marigold felt when they were unable to contact their new friend by any means except the journal was genuinely scary. I’m looking forward to where this story goes—hop on board now folks!

🔪 Jeez louise, @hellofromthehallowoods is gonna kill me. Voltaire. Leave that man alone you creep. I hate him so much. I am looking forward to seeing if Lady Ethel Mallory makes an appearance for real, and if so, how she’s changed in fourteen years.

🗝️ Can we talk about Divorce Ranch?? This is a newer show from Good Story Guild that I’ve been catching up on, a historical mystery set in fifties Reno, when a major part of their appeal was how easy it was to 1) establish a residency and then 2) get a no-fault divorce. And then there’s a MURDER, and a charming wet meow meow of a detective. This one is definitely worth the listen.

✨ @storiesfromylelmore posted the CUTEST Q&A bit, it’s honestly perfect. Hey they’re crowdfunding! Go give them some cash!

🦎 In Hannah News, while the Dead is on hiatus, I am finishing up the work on this season of Inn Between (which mostly involves being super impressed with Katherine all the time). This finale is going to be a treat, you have to hop on the season five train.

See you all next week!