I began writing The Undoing of My Marriage a couple of years into starting over as a divorced single mum in my late thirties.
While the story is true to my experiences, AJ Moore is a pseudonym, and names, locations, and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of others – and to keep ‘AJ’ separate (if you work with me or you’re related to me, I’d rather not know you know!).

Like many people with preconceived ideas about love and commitment, I mistook the hormonally charged honeymoon phase for ‘true love’ and rushed through the milestones, only to find myself disillusioned when the ‘happily ever after’ I’d dreamed of felt more like an anticlimax. The issue wasn’t just the high expectations ingrained in me from Disney fairytales and nineties rom coms – it was that I couldn’t possibly see how wide the gap was between who I was then and the woman I’d become over the next few years.

My husband occasionally quoted that old, dismissive saying, “Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not.” While it would annoy me, and was normally said in defence of his gaming fixation past the age of twenty-five, I have to admit now that there was a broader truth in it.

As an idealistic twenty-something standing at the altar and promising forever to him that day, I couldn’t possibly predict the ways my feelings, desires, and identity would shift over the years – or the complicated duality of being both a mother and a wife, caught between not wanting to be selfish and not wanting to disappear.

That duality is at the heart of The Undoing of My Marriage – when the version of yourself you’ve become can’t emerge in the life built for who you used to be, and when you desire novelty and passion, but not at the cost of comfort and stability.

As a way of processing those conflicting thoughts and emotions I was experiencing back then, I turned to writing poetry – after all, it was at the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many of us had taken up new hobbies and were questioning our lives.

Originally written in real time, as I was living it, the poems woven through the chapters chronicle my emotional and sexual journey, and my unravelling, as my husband and I embarked on what I convinced myself (and him) would be the perfect solution for sustaining the life we’d built and keeping our family together while meeting my own need for personal fulfilment – an open marriage.

While the prose narrative constructed around those poems was written much later, my aim was to write from the raw and unfiltered perspective of myself during that period, when I turned to poetry to try and make sense of my inner chaos and articulate the feelings I found it hard to admit to myself – before I knew how it would all end up.

Beyond the book, I’ve continued to write about life since my marriage ended. My inspiration is drawn from where I sit now, on the other side of it – as I grieve the life I thought I’d have, navigate the realities of dating again as a divorced single mum, and continue the ongoing journey of figuring out who I am now, and what I want. I post my writing here (sporadically) on the Poems from After page.

If you’ve read The Undoing of My Marriage, go to Not a Fairytale Ending to download its companion novella, Not a Fairytale Ending – The Rewriting of My Story (19,000 words)..

If you’ve just finished my book or were simply curious about it, thanks for reading if you’re still with me. If you’re inclined, please leave a review on one of the platforms below to help the book find its audience:

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To get in touch, visit the contact page or email me at [email protected]. Media enquiries are also welcome.  

Warmest regards,

AJ Moore