Why this book exists
A focused place to understand what is happening
Alastair is thirty-eight. His parents divorced when he was nine, and he has spent twenty-nine years being told two contradictory things about it. The first is that divorce damages children permanently, which he encounters in newspaper columns and which makes him wonder whether the difficulties in his adult relationships are traceable to a Tuesday in 1996. The second is that children are resilient and that his parents did the right thing, which he encounters from almost everybody who knows him and which makes his continuing sense of something unresolved feel like self-indulgence. He does not know which is true. Nobody has ever told him what the evidence actually says, and both accounts are usually deployed by people making an argument about divorce.
The writing is designed to reduce shame, bring the underlying pattern into view and give you practical ways to respond without pretending that every life follows the same formula.
