The Love They Lost: Living with the Legacy of Our Parents' Divorce

I'm so glad I found this book! For a long time I have been trying to figure out how my parents' divorce 25 years ago has affected me. The stories in this book and the author's insight gave me a comforting "legitimacy" for my feelings and helped me to verbalize them. It made me realize that I'm not alone. Staal discusses many issues that arise during and after parents divorce, like how money is often equated with love, how all family relationships change, how the history of a family is revised. She describes why many adult children of divorce usually show three different types of behavior in their romantic relationships: "the nester," "the wary investor" and the "commitment-phobe." Immediately after finishing the last page, I ordered copies for my mother, my father, and my sister with the hope that we can start to talk more openly about what happened in our family. I don't usually buy self-help books, but this book isn't like that. It's beautifully written. The author includes her own emotions and personal experiences from her parents' divorce, and some of her memories were so sad, I cried. I never felt like she was preaching or telling me there was something wrong with me. Rather, I felt like I was talking to a good friend who could understand where I was coming from. Within the pages of this book, I read passages that could have come from my own journal. I heard my own voice. It is a must read for all adult children of divorce - or anyone whose life has been touched by divorce.

It's as if the author was in my life and wrote about it. She has incredible insight and writing ability. I've read dozens of self-help books, but none have really helped me to figure out why I react the way I do in certain situations. It had never occurred to me that it is a result of a divorce that happened when I was six. A lot of bad memories that I had buried long ago came flooding back to me when I read accounts of other's experiences. This would seem bad, but in fact I now understand so much more and I can begin healing and work on the issues in my own relationship that are a direct result of my past. I highly recommend this to any child of divorce, even if you feel you are past it. I'm buying another copy for my sister right now!

This book makes an easy-reading companion piece to Judith Wallerstein's 25 year study of divorce. It's not filled up with case studies or self-help platitudes, but stories that ring true and are pretty much guaranteed to get you re-living memories of your own parent's divorce. The various stories are personal and full of emotion, but generally avoid specific blame and try to simply recount childhood experiences of confusion and change. Staal writes about her own experience with clarity, and she has done a remarkable job relating personal experiences to others who similarly put a lid on their own feelings until reaching maturity. Adults who are discovering that their parent's divorce continues to affect them will find themselves in these pages; happily, Staal leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about the material she has collected. The later chapters that concern adult children of divorce seeking their own long-term relationships seem to show the same results that Wallerstein's book does--that when parent's divorce, children often realize the strongest effects of that divorce when attempting to achieve true intimacy with their primary partner.

What I like most about this book is that the author keeps her promises. As she states at the beginning, it's not a how-to book or a book that has all the answers. Rather, it simply shares the experiences of the author as well as the people who were interviewed. Staal does an incredible job of mixing first-person accounts with information from the 120 interviews she performed. This gives the book a narrative flow which will keep you reading and make you anxious to hear how her parents' divorce impacted her life. If your parents were divorced or if you are having trouble finding love, this book will undoubtedly teach you a lot about yourself.

I bought this book upon recommendation. My parents are not divorced, I must admit, and therefore I may not be the perfect reader for this book. But nevertheless, I found it fascinating. There was a passion on the part of the author for the subject matter, which enabled her to write with a certain clarity and elegance. Moreover, this book could so easily have turned into a semi-academic work. But instead the author brings out the `soft' issues of divorce and its impact, with some success - arguably this is a greater challenge. Most importantly, it is what most adult children of divorce are seeking. The author mentions near the end that writing this book was a difficult experience for her. I think many readers who are from similar backgounds to her will have found in this book answers to nagging questions, and therefore will be thankful to the author for having undertaken the writing.