After her divorce, Susan Luzader was, in her own words, “going feral.” One night, she was fixing her dinner: a bowl of Cheerios and a glass of wine.
“What kind of wine goes with Cheerios?” she asked herself.
Find out the answer to that and other questions that arise during a suddenly single life in Luzader’s new book, “Wine and Cereal,” a series of short essays where she ponders the questions anyone faces when they get a divorce — albeit a PG take on it.
After 42 years, her then-husband decided to go in a different direction. Luzader said she fell apart. For six months she functioned, she cried and she felt sorry for herself. Her very good friend Susan Smith, who is also a writer, “saved my life,” Luzader said. “She took charge.”
Although Luzader wanted to stay at home, her friend dragged her to a writing class. Luzader is no stranger to writing; she’s a former journalist. The class was unexpectedly fun.
“I went and I had a blast,” she said. “I enjoyed it so much and I got great feedback on my writing. I thought, ‘My friend was right. I need to go back to writing.’ I had been journaling but mostly just feeling sorry for myself … but you can’t do that forever. You have to go on.”
After a session with a therapist and plenty of ugly crying, she actually found humor and her voice again. She started a blog and someone suggested she should publish her entries as a book. Publishers, however, were not convinced.
Luzader got a publicist, who started pumping up the blog. Eventually she found a small publishing house and now, she has a book with illustrations by her great-niece, Claire Luzader.
“It was never intended to be a book,” Luzader said. “It was intended as therapy. It’s still therapy.”
Reading Luzader’s essays, it is clear she has a sense of humor. Finding the funny in a situation is how she takes power over it, she said. Take, for example, the subject of dating.
“I hated dating,” she said. “I just hated it.”
Still, she wrote about finding the right clothes, asking herself. “What do you wear on a date these days? What kind of underwear?” She wrote about her new identity as a “crother,” a cross between a crone and a mother.
It turned out that putting the book together was one of the hardest parts, Luzader said. From putting it together to finding a publisher to getting the book to booksellers’ shelves, it took three years.
Luzader has advice for anyone who is facing a divorce they didn’t initiate.
“I think they need to know what their therapy is,” Luzader said. “It could be art. It could be dancing. It could be photography. Find what feeds your soul and focus on that and work through whatever you’re going through with that.”
It was writing that brought Luzader back to life.
When she was going through it, Luzader asked the women she knew what mistakes they made during their divorce.
“Number one answer, ‘I settled too soon,’” she said. “They just wanted to be done with it and divorce attorneys count on that. They count on the woman saying, ‘OK, I give up.’”
The divorce took longer — Luzader’s took three years — but she got the house, her mother’s condo and her business.
Single life can be satisfying; it turned out OK for Luzader.
“I remember maybe a year after he left getting into bed with a novel, a glass of wine, the dogs were on the bed and thinking, ‘You know, it doesn’t get much better than this,’” she said.
Find “Wine and Cereal,” in the usual places.
