a guide to divorce with movie recs from haley mlotek and book recs from philosophy and politics of love professor samantha hill
an unfiltered guide to navigating a divorce
an unfiltered guide to navigating a divorce
At the end of 2024, we shared reflections from passersby on the previous year. Anne Rubin reflected on her own divorce and told us “so many women I know are in the process of getting a divorce.” And it does feel like there’s something in the air — with books like Splinters, Liars, and All Fours (one of passerby’s best books of 2024), divorce is on many people’s minds. Here is our guide to what divorce is like and how to get through it, with insight from divorce lawyer and mediator Joy Rosenthal, Haley Mlotek, author of No Fault, a book about the history of divorce, and the passerby community.
“My life flourished after my divorce, whether it was friendships or career or love. I had a whole new sense of self, and a new sense of how much bigger life can be than I’d thought from a very young age. I gave into feelings more — if something made me feel good, I did it. If it made me feel bad, I avoided it. I learned that I'm way more resilient and more capable than I thought. It has taught me that, as corny as it may sound, you really only have to live with yourself. Life moves on; this feeling of life or death, that you can’t move on without someone, is not real. I do believe in love and romance and in marriage itself, but my perception has shifted, from being completely dependent on the idea to wanting to be in a healthy marriage.” — Arsh
Additionally, after our founder, Clémence Polès got divorced, she took a philosophy course at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (a passerby partner — join the club for 25% off classes) on the philosophy and politics of love. As she says in the guide, “It was cool to process my divorce from a philosophical angle: what is love? And to think about and be critical of how society defines it and how our desires are very influenced by that.”
Read on below for reading suggestions from the professor who taught that class, Samantha Hill, as well as movie recs from Haley Mlotek.
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Samantha Hill is the author of Hannah Arendt (2021, Reaktion Books) and Hannah Arendt’s Poems (forthcoming 2023, Liveright). She is currently writing a book on loneliness for Yale University Press. She shares with us a variety of readings to contextualize divorce and heal your heart:
Non-fiction: Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy if you’re thinking about never getting married again.