That evening, the agent who represents me in Europe phoned and in the course of conversation I told her about this book about late-life divorce I intended to write. She called the phenomenon "the European epidemic" and surprised me by saying that it was rampant in France and Germany. Germany, perhaps, I replied, but France? Didn't husbands and wives just go their separate ways, as all the movies and books portrayed French marriage, and didn't they stay married just to keep the money in the family? No longer, the agent said. European divorce statistics are fast catching up to those in the rest of the world. Even China was jumping on the bandwagon.
In the spring and summer of 2005 I had a chance to see for myself how common late-life divorce was becoming when I went to Australia and New Zealand to lecture, participate in writers festivals, and be a writer-in-residence at a Sydney university. People everywhere asked what my new book would be, and when I told them, so many came forward to tell me their stories that I realized it was truly a worldwide phenomenon.
But how, I wondered, would I tell these many different stories? As I am neither a sociologist nor a cultural anthropologist, I knew from the beginning that the book would not be a statistical survey or a scientific treatise. What I thought the book needed to be, and what I wanted it to be, and what it has become, is a collection of stories told to me by husbands and wives who chose to end long marriages, as well as the stories of adult children of late-life divorce, who told me how their parents' breakups affected them. My main objective was to let real people talk so that others might find in their stories something helpful - utility (guidance on how to divorce if they believed they had no other option), information (about the financial reality they would have to face after divorce, for example), or comfort (ways to live a satisfying life as a single after many years of being part of a couple).
I set out to collect as many stories as people wanted to tell me and to let them fall naturally into whatever categories or patterns they assumed. The AARP survey had 1,147 respondents, and initially I was hoping to amass about one tenth that number, or approximately 150 case histories. I began to interview in October 2004, and to my amazement, by the time I finished writing in early 2006, I had interviewed 126 men, 1S4 women, and 84 adult children. I continued to interview people until the writing was finished, for I learned something new with every interview and I wanted to incorporate everything I thought would be useful, helpful, and informative for those already divorced or for those contemplating it.
I found my subjects by word of mouth, as people learned that I was writing this book and one person told another, who had a friend, who told another friend, and so on. When I tried to describe my research methods, my sociologist friends told me I was using the well-respected technique of "snowball sampling,' in which information accretes to a point where it can be interpreted to give legitimate findings. Almost two thirds of my interviewees found me and volunteered to talk. In general, women were more open and eager, whereas men were not only hesitant about being interviewed, they were also more guarded and circumspect about what they wanted to tell me. Whenever possible, I tried to interview both parties to the divorce, but frequently - with about a third of the ex-couples - one or the other was so angry and bitter that he or she would threaten me with the dire things that would happen if I dared to contact the ex-spouse. I honored the request and did not initiate contact, but if the ex got in touch with me. then I conducted an interview. All the while I was interviewing, I kept remembering what a man in Switzerland told me when his wife ended their thirty-seven-year marriage: "There are five truths in my divorce: mine, my wife's, and our three children's. That was why I thought it was so important to get all sides of the story whenever I could, and why I also interviewed the adult children of divorced parents. It was interesting to me to explore just how the parental divorce affected the adult children's relationships and their attitudes toward marriage.
My respondents include straight, gay. and lesbian couples. They came from many social classes, from (to use some simplistic terms here) 'high society.' business elites (CEOs), and high-level politicians, to the stable managerial and working classes, to those I call the working poor, who hold service jobs or irregular employment. I also talked to divorce lawyers, mediators, and judges who specialize in what is euphemistically known as 'family law. To my regret, my study population is mostly white: I had too few Hispanic and African and Asian American respondents to relate their stories as being representative of a larger group.
Most of my interviews were conducted by telephone because my respondents lived throughout the world and the time and money needed for travel precluded face-to-face conversations. Initially I was disappointed that I would not have in-person interviews with everyone, but overall, when I compared personal interviews with those on the telephone, I found that the phone provided exactly the right degree of separation and the perfect buffer between people who were often hurt, angry, or confused and the stranger at the other end to whom they were confiding such intimate details of their lives.
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