Bogger Amy Koko bears her soul in her witty, bittersweet memoir, There’s Been A Change of Plans: Divorce, Dating & Delinquents in Mid-life. Expecting a trip to Italy, Koko is blind-sided by her husband’s confession that he’s been putting his shoes under a much younger and prettier woman’s bed. After twenty-seven years of marriage and four children, she faces the unimaginable: her life as she knows it is unraveling around her and her family’s future is anything but certain.
In the literary tradition of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Koko’s memoir details her journey from hearing the news that her husband is in love with a blonde, thirty-something Swiss pastry chef to trying everything from thong underwear to a mini-facelift to save her marriage, only to see it die in the parking lot of gas station.
With incredible honesty and humor, Koko takes the reader on a wild ride through the tough, emotional times of starting over through divorce, mid-life, finding a job, and Internet dating, all the while trying to keep her four teenagers out of jail.
There’s been a change of plans, and that’s just the beginning.
My review:
Although I love reading memoirs, I wasn’t sure this book would interest me, since it centers around divorce. Having said that, Amy was also handling midlife issues as I am and so I decided to read and review it. An easy read despite that it handles such a difficult subject. Amy doesn’t hold back in sharing the grief and pain she felt at her husband leaving for a younger woman. This after 27 years of marriage. I was pleasantly surprised to realize that rather than a laundry list of woes, Amy tells her story with a great deal of wit and humour.
I began not just to laugh but to admire a woman who can turn something so sad, into a celebration of life and of her spirit and manage to connect with so many other women through her words.
I’m sold on Amy’s brand of humour and have signed up for her blog updates.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.