READ THIS BOOK OR I SHOOT THE DOG!: Two weeks ago I finished Elizabeth Marquardt’s new book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. You can read excerpts here. Basically, this book is amazing, and everyone should read it, right now.

The book is based on two interlocking research projects: a nationally-representative survey of 1,500 young adults, and the in-depth interviews on which the survey questions were based. She interviewed 70 young adults with at least a college degree: 35 from intact families, 35 from divorced families who had ongoing contact with both parents. By focusing on college graduates and people who had maintained relationships with both parents, she hoped to screen out most of the worst-case scenarios–she wasn’t interested so much in the well-documented research showing that people whose parents divorce are at greater risk of low educational attainment, criminal involvement, etc. In the nationally-representative survey, respondents’ families were divided into low-conflict intact, high-conflict intact, low-conflict divorced, and high-conflict divorced. Marquardt wanted to study how even “good divorces” affect children’s moral and spiritual development: how children learn who they are, what is true, what is the right thing to do, how to understand and approach God.

What she learned is that there is, essentially, an undiscovered culture in this country: the culture of children of divorce. Their experiences, in general, differ from the experiences of children from intact families in a host of ways. They’re much more likely to focus on and monitor their parents’ emotions and needs from a very young age; much more likely to feel as though they were “a different person” with each parent; much more likely to have felt physically unsafe as a child. Beyond the abstractions and statistics, Marquardt really delves into how divorce is experienced–how children grow, and are strengthened by the challenges they face; but how even “resilient” children, “little adults,” suffer, often very deeply.

Marquardt is very clear that she isn’t saying all divorces are wrong. She isn’t calling for legal changes to make divorce more difficult (at least not in this book–I don’t know her position on such changes). She isn’t blaming divorced parents. She has a strong relationship with her own parents, who supported her in her research, and it’s clear that she loves them very much and knows that they both love her. But she does hope that by pointing out the often-hidden struggles children of divorce undergo, she will encourage more people in difficult marriages to work out their troubles and stay together.

This is a profound, moving book. A very good review is here if you need more before you spend your shekels.