Starting Over Whole: Divorce Recovery Stories

Inside this volume

Fifty first-person accounts describe divorce and separation through what it did to health: sleepless months, weight loss, hives, hair loss, raised blood pressure, chest pain that turned out not to be the heart, stomach trouble, shingles, migraines, pauses in breathing at night noticed by a daughter and, for one retired police sergeant, a heart attack beside a snow shovel. The writers include a 26-year-old who lost her husband and her health insurance in the same month, a woman who left at seventy-two and bought green suede shoes, a family solicitor, a nurse married to a drinker, a fly-in fly-out miner, a sheep farmer and a woman in Quezon City who waited eight years for an annulment, writing from Pune to Canterbury, New Zealand. Marriages ended over affairs, drinking, two lost pregnancies, a husband taking another wife, a DNA kit, a text message, or no villain at all. Writers describe custody fights, parallel parenting, nearly two hundred flights to see daughters, debts in their name and learning to cook at sixty-seven. What helped included honest talks with doctors, support groups, walking football and forest paths. Some accounts are darker: a night calling a crisis helpline, gambling, cannabis that stopped helping, a daughter who stopped speaking, a husband who left during chemotherapy. Several are still sad on some evenings.

Who it's for

For anyone in the first raw weeks of a separation or further down the road, and for friends and relatives who want to understand what someone going through a divorce is not saying.

Format · Instant download · PDF & EPUB · Fifty first-person accounts · PDF: 233 pages

A collection of personal testimony, offered as companion reading — not medical advice.

• 50 single-author testimonies from real people
• A short, plain-language introduction to the topic
• Editor's note, contents page, and curated resource list
• Professional interior typesetting and an original cover

Every purchase includes a print-quality PDF (best for desktop, tablet, and printing) and a reflowable EPUB (best for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and phones). Files are DRM-free. You can download both instantly from the order-confirmation screen, and we email them to your inbox as well, so your books are always within reach.