Abigail Trafford - Crazy Time: Surviving Divorce and Building a New Life

First, I want to thank all of you who have written me over the years. Your words mean a lotadding details to our shared experience of divorce and affirming our resilience in the face of crisis. I just wanted to say Thanks, writes a man from Illinois in a recent e-mail. Those days really were Crazy.

I also want to thank those who helped me conceive of Crazy Time and produce the first two editions: editor Robbin Reynolds and her successor, Peternelle van Arsdale; and my agent, Carl D. Brandt. In addition, many psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and family counselors have given their time and insight on the subject of marriage and divorce. Some of the experts quoted in the book have moved on to different institutions or into retirement. But I have included their affiliations at the time of the interview. I have also left their quotes in the present tense because what they have to say about love and loss and love regained is timeless.

For this edition, I am grateful to agent Gail Ross and to the editors at HarperCollins, Trish Daly and Maya Ziv, for letting me update the American saga of divorce. The statistics are new; the basics of breaking up remain the same.

Most of all, my thanks go to family and friends who have stood by me over the years of living and writing Crazy Time and moving on to a new life. Some, like my parents, are deceased, but I include them because they are part of the long-evolving story of writing about love: Patricia Avery, Katrina McCormick Barnes, Candace Boyden, Annie Boyden and Perry Trafford Boyden, Lincoln and Edith Boyden, Christopher and Bunny Clark, Susanna and Moose Colloredo, Elizabeth Reynolds Colt, Ann Crittenden and John Henry, Susan Dooley, Mary D. and Thomas Byrne Edsall, Murray and Jean Gart, Mary Hadar, Caroline Herron, Eloise and Art Hodges, Mary Eliot Jackson, Janet Barnes and John Lawrence, Rebecca Lescaze and Mark Borthwick, Delia Mares, Dennis Mullin, Gertrude M. Neff, Angie Olson, Garrill Goss Page, Zipporah Raymond, Heddy F. and Thorburn Reid, Christian Robertson, Geoff Schaefer, Harvey I. Sloane, Crocker Snow Jr., June B. Spencer, Sophia Stone, Frances E. and Bayard T. Storey, Arthur and Agnes Terry, James L. and Maude Terry, Elizabeth Trafford, Perry D. and Polly Trafford, Stella M. Trafford, William Bradford Trafford, Nicholas von Hoffman, Ann Waldron, Clare Whitfield, Sherley Young. Central, of course, to the book was the support of my two daughtersAbigail Miller and Victoria Brettand my second husband, Donald L. Neff.

Finally, I want to thank the men and women who shared their stories for the book, who talked honestly and bravely about their lives, laying bare the most painful secrets. It is through these men and women that the stages of divorce take shape on the following pages. Although they remain nameless to preserve their privacy, each one has my respect and profound appreciation.

As Time Goes By: Boomerang Marriages,
Serial Spouses, Throwback Couples, and Other Romantic
Adventures in an Age of Longevity

My Time: Making the Most of the Bonus Decades After Fifty

ABIGAIL TRAFFORD is an author, journalist, and public speaker. She wrote the My Time column at the Washington Post and has been a commentator for Washington Post Radio and a syndicated columnist with Universal Press Syndicate. For fourteen years she was the Posts health editor and previously worked at U.S. News & World Report as a writer, senior editor, and assistant managing editor. She received journalism fellowships at the Harvard School of Public Health in 1982 and 2002 and was a visiting scholar at the Stanford University Center on Longevity in 2007. She lives in Boston and Vinalhaven, Maine.

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People will ask you: I didnt know you were having trouble. What went wrong? You already know the easy answersthey were in the script of the confrontation scene. Then some of your friends say: I never liked the bitch/bastard you were married to anyway. You wonder if they know something you never knew. Then you go over the confrontation script again, refining your grievances, sharpening the battles. The main thing is to get this over with and get on with life. You roll the breakup scene around in your mind for a few nights. Your emotional editing process gets to work. You put the story through your memory a couple of times. Its finished, you think. The marriage is dead.