A Memoir
Love Rehab
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One marriage ends. One woman climbs out of the wreckage — dress and all — and finds out what she is actually made of.
Vivian Tyler
Writer, divorce survivor, and reluctant expert on starting over.
Love
Rehab
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Vivian Tyler
The Book
A divorce memoir that lets you laugh
Love Rehab begins on the worst afternoon of Vivian Tyler's life and refuses to stay there. Part field report from the end of a marriage, part instruction manual for anyone rebuilding from scratch, it moves through the paperwork, the pity casseroles, and the strange, bright mornings that follow — with the kind of humor that only arrives once you have survived the thing.
It is a book for the woman sitting in her car in a parking lot, deciding what happens next.
- 01 The night the marriage ended, told in the order it actually happened.
- 02 What the lawyers never mention, and what the group chat gets wrong.
- 03 Learning to sleep in the middle of the bed.
- 04 Dating again at an age when nobody is pretending anymore.
- 05 Resilience, unglamorously: the small repeated choices that rebuilt a life.
Excerpt
From Chapter One
The dress was still in the garment bag when I carried it out to the alley. I had imagined this moment as something cinematic — wind, a lifted chin, a soundtrack. What actually happened was that the bag caught on the dumpster latch and I stood there in the July heat, sweating, negotiating with a zipper.
Nobody tells you that the end of a marriage is mostly logistics. The grief arrives on schedule, but it has to take its turn behind the account transfers and the mail forwarding and the question of who keeps the good pan. I answered the question of the good pan on a Tuesday. I cried about it on a Thursday, in a parking lot, with a coffee going cold in the cup holder.
This is the part I want to tell you about: not the ending, which everyone can picture, but the eleven months after it, when I had no idea what I was doing and did it anyway.
Reviews
“Funny in the way only honest books are funny.”
Review pending
“I handed it to my sister before I finished the last chapter.”
Early reader
“A memoir about resilience that never once lectures you.”
Review pending
Buy the Book
Love Rehab is available now
Hardcover, ebook, and audiobook. Ask for it at your local bookshop, or order from any of these.