Not a Fairytale Ending: The Rewriting of My Story is not only about literally rewriting my messy first attempt at The Undoing of My Marriage, but also about the period that followed – gaining clarity, letting go of hope, and slowly realising what it meant to ‘find myself’ outside of a relationship.

Once my publishing journey got underway, I sat down to write a short blurb for my website about why I wrote my book. What began as a couple of paragraphs quickly turned into a page, which eventually grew into a 19,600-word autofiction novella about the process of writing The Undoing of My Marriage while still in a ‘casual’ relationship I was far too invested in. Sometimes, I surprise myself.

Although he’d dominated my thoughts for years, my feelings were too raw at the time to write about him beyond a handful of poems. As it turned out, writing the novella gave me a kind of closure he never could – and allowed me to see more clearly how much of that relationship hinged on hope, how much was real, and how much of my post-divorce identity I’d unconsciously constructed around him.

As the title suggests, this isn’t a fairytale ending – just a story I needed to write. If you’re caught between knowing you deserve more than being someone’s placeholder and rationalising it because something feels better than nothing (and the sex is so good!), it might resonate with you.