I began writing The Undoing of My Marriage a couple of years into ‘starting over’ as a divorced single mum in my late thirties. It wasn’t exactly the life I’d planned.

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 from my professional life (if you’ve read the book, you’ll understand).

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 my expectations – it was me.

I’d roll my eyes when my husband quoted, “Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not,” but I had to admit there was truth in it. The woman who stood at the altar in front of him that day couldn’t have anticipated how much she’d evolve. And while I’d heard nothing prepares you for parenthood, no one warned me about the duality of being both mother and wife – or the slow suffocation of the woman buried under those roles, 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 another one, 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 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. Unlike journalling, which only seemed to exacerbate my rumination spirals, writing poetry brought clarity to my inner chaos – helping me make sense of emotions I couldn’t yet name, and, in some ways, laying the groundwork for the path ahead before I was ready to face it.

While life is thankfully too settled now to evoke many poetic verses, occasionally inspiration still strikes. You can read my more recent poetry on the Poems from After page, where my collection continues beyond The Undoing of My Marriage.

If you've finished the book and are curious about what (and who) came next, my companion novella, Not a Fairytale Ending – The Rewriting of My Story is free to download from the Not a Fairytale Ending page (you'll need the password at the end of The Undoing of My Marriage to unlock it).

Whether you’ve just finished my book or were simply curious about it, thanks for reading if you’re still with me. If something resonated or made you feel more seen, I’d love to hear from you.

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

Warmest regards,

AJ Moore