It is the story of how someone, I cannot imagine who, got dumped by her husband and cried and ate Cheetos off her chest and somehow, somewhere along the way she actually kind of figured out how to live life.  Also, there is knitting. And sex. (!!!) OK, not much but I do say the word.  And there is dating.  And hair removal.  And made-up words that drove the copyeditor insane.

Yes!  Oh, and don’t forget the part about hair removal.  Fun!

Oh, no.  No siree bob. I am a very frugal minded person, you see, and I thought it would be a crying shame to pay some outrageous amount for a book you could just print up your own damn self.  So you will get to read the stuff I never, ever publish on the website.  The parts of my marriage I skirt around, stuff I don’t feel okay putting up for comment.  Then there is the entire part of my life we call “Dating.” I don’t talk about it online because I just cannot take that amount of advice in one sitting.  My readers are in fact very self-helpy their own darn selves!  There is definitely content from the website oin the book but it’s all ben re-worked and re-written so it even seems different to me...and I wrote the thing.

It is, what I can remember from the fog of merlot.  Although some names had to be changed to protect...you know.  Some people.  But keep in mind it is also a story.  I stayed pretty true to the facts and only tinkered with the timeline.  Since the material for the book stretched over a two-year period, obviously you would have had to plod through the “War And Peace” of my bellyaching and carrying on, and as it turns out “Self Help” books are not supposed to make the reader want to kill themselves.  Funny how that works!  So the timeline is not a perfect 100% documentation of 867 days as the crow flies, and I shortened the crazy parts.

My divorce made me crazy.  And none of my friends could relate, my family just worried about me, and it seemed like everyone else in the world got divorced just pain-free and easy as pie.  Celebrities seem to get divorced and remarried every five minutes!  And here I felt like I was losing my mind half the time.  I had wished desperately when I was puddled up on the floor heartbroken and smelly that someone, anyone, could tell me I wasn’t alone.  So that is why I wrote this book--maybe another woman out there going through a crappy breakup will red it and feel less crazy, less fogged-up with despair.  And the truth is that my life has gotten better in ways I could have never imagined, and in the end my divorce3 was probably the best thing that could have happened.  But I didn’t get there over night, it took three years.  Sometimes I still want to eat Cheetos off my chest.

I think writing about him was the hardest part of writing this book. He’s not an evil, horrible guy and I wasn’t a perfect wife.  Sometimes two basically good people can make a spectacular mess of things.  And the divorce was hard on me.  So I wanted to make this book about the divorcing part, the place that women go to when the dream they had for their life dies.  It’s not a book about him, it’s about my experience of figuring out how to live this new life, the one I didn’t want at the time and wasn’t at all prepared for.  No, he probably didn’t handle the divorce the greatest way possible, but neither did I (See:  Cheetos, drinking, temporary insanity.)

Everyone kept telling me to take up a hobby to get my mind off things.  Apparently they did not think drinking 7/8 of a bottle of cabernet was a hobby, per se. So one day a friend invited me to her knitting class and I went.  Learning to knit kept my hands busy so I did not make horribly embarrassing drunk dial phone calls at all hours of the night.  I’m sure some people take up other hobbies when they most need a diversionary tactic to get through a tough time, and knitting was mine.

Not by any stretch of the imagination!  What I lack in skill, expertise, style and know-how I make up in jokes.  I am also a very slow knitter, and I’m notorious for never following a pattern.  I am, however an expert at knitting scarves while drinking wine and watching TV.

Being from the South is like being Catholic.  You can move, change your name, take voice and diction lessons to lose that accent...but in the end you still want the Last Rites, or in our case, fried chicken.  I’m in love with Los Angeles, this is one crazy, amazing, exhilarating city.  But I will always and forever be Southern.  Recently I bought one of those re-usable grocery bnags from Trader Joe’s and my friend Faith--who was born and raised in L.A.--asked me why I wasn’t using it for my grocery trip to Whole Foods.  I had to explain to her taht I didn’t want to be disrespectful to THE GROCERY STORE.  This is a uniquely Southern trait.  She still does not get it, poor thing.

Oh, good grief, yes, who on God’s green earth would make up a detail like that?  That’s like saying to prospective dates, “Here’s my phone number, by the way I only shave my legs on Tuesdays!” It’s not exactly the apex of sexy.