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

The Love They Lost: Living with the Legacy of Our Parents' Divorce by Staal, Stephanie. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780385334099.

"Divorce May Be Everywhere We Turn, Yet for Many Adult Children of Divorce, There Remains a Silence on the Issues We Want Most to Hear About. "Experts try to measure the effects of divorce through school performance, criminal records, psychological tests, but we know the final price of our parents divorce is paid when we make our own attempts at love and security. After all, in the conversations that pepper everyday life, we talk about our intimate relationships--our hopes and our fears, our fights and our reconciliations. It is not enough to say, as many experts do, that children of divorce are more likely to divorce themselves. The anxiety that crackles through so many of our relationships cannot be dismissed as a simple matter of cause and effect. Of course, divorce continues to shape our behavior, for divorce is all we know. Its a part of who we are. That much is obvious. The hard part is for us to figure out how to move forward while living with the past. Through frank conversations with other adult children of divorce, this book will trace some of the specific ways in which our emotional makeup today is informed by our parents divorce of yesterday.