REVIEW: FALLING APART IN ONE PIECE

falling apart in one piece -  one optimist's journey through the hell of divorce
by Stacy Morrison
(Pages 239)
Release date:  March 24th

First of all, thank you to Michelle at Simon and Schuster Canada for sending me an ARC of this book!

This is a story about Morrison's journey through divorce.  She is the successful editor-in-chief of Redbook Magazine, but even while she is soaring in the publishing world her personal life is doing a severe nosedive with no ejection seat in sight.  One day out of the blue her husband announces that he is leaving her and that he can't stand living with her, and he then moves out and leaves her and her infant son to deal with the crumbling house and flooding basement.

Okay, if I'm going to be honest here, I would say that this is not a book that I'm going to rave about.  Stacy Morrison is a good writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed her writing style.  And the first part of the book where she describes her idyllic home life and the details of the day her husband suddenly tells her he is leaving her, are all beautifully written.   And the rest of the book really has its moments, but it's a lot of the same stuff just retold.  I have personally been through a divorce, I had no kids at the time, so I could relate to much of what Morrison was saying.  Especially the part where she was getting super pissed off that people wanted her to whittle down the reason for her divorce into a short concise message.  I used to say after my divorce, that it was not something a person could just summarize in one sentence.  And this is what Morrison was saying.  And she also points out that when people are asking that they aren't necessarily asking about you, they are asking, "do I see myself in here?  Is MY marriage okay?".  The one thing I will say that is a big positive about Morrison's book is that she definately can look long and hard at herself and at a situation and be brutally honest.  I appreciated all of her soul searching as I have been there myself.

Now, the thing I didn't like about it was that Morrison seems like an energy vampire.  You know what I mean?  There are some people in life that seem to suck the energy from people they are near, and I sensed that even from her writing.  I could be way off, but at the very least her book sucked the ever living life right out of me.  About 1/2 way through I was thinking to myself, "Girl, get a therapist!"  And then not one page later did she say that she had already been seeing a shrink for the past decade.  The majority of the book was very draining to read.  Like that person in your life that always has the same problems for years and obsessively talks about the same things over and over until they have finally driven their last friend away with their continuous woes.  I felt a huge amount of relief when I reached the end!  So sad, really.  This is the only reason I am rating it a "2".  Otherwise it would have probably been a "3", but I just could not deny the fact that it was completely exhausting to read.  I think people who have been through divorce will, at the very least, be able to really relate to everything she went through on the outside and more importantly the journey into herself.  It goes to show that divorce does not care if you are a successful business woman hobb knobbing with celebrities, it will still kick your ass just as hard as someone who works at a convenience store.... to that end we are all very much made of the same stuff...fragile and yet with powerful wings to lift us up out of our own misery --- God willing.

RATING:  2/5