---
product_id: 41935312
title: "Falling Apart in One Piece: One Optimist's Journey Through the Hell of Divorce"
brand: "stacy morrison"
price: "5820 kr"
currency: ISK
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 7
category: "Books"
url: https://www.desertcart.is/products/41935312-falling-apart-in-one-piece-one-optimists-journey-through-hell
store_origin: IS
region: Iceland
---

# Falling Apart in One Piece: One Optimist's Journey Through the Hell of Divorce

**Brand:** stacy morrison
**Price:** 5820 kr
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Falling Apart in One Piece: One Optimist's Journey Through the Hell of Divorce by stacy morrison
- **How much does it cost?** 5820 kr with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.is](https://www.desertcart.is/products/41935312-falling-apart-in-one-piece-one-optimists-journey-through-hell)

## Best For

- stacy morrison enthusiasts

## Why This Product

- Trusted stacy morrison brand quality
- Free international shipping included
- Worldwide delivery with tracking
- 15-day hassle-free returns

## Description

Review
        	  
        	  
        		  
        		  
	        		
						
			        		&#x201C;I loved the tone of this honest, thoughtful memoir: heartbreaking and real, without the slightest hint of self-pity.&#x201D; &#x2014;ELIZABETH GILBERT, AUTHOR OF EAT, PRAY, LOVE AND COMMITTED&#x201C;Stacy Morrison&#x2019;s memoir is as sweet as it is sad, both honest as an anvil and full of genuine hope. Morrison&#x2019;s buoyant prose and hard-earned wisdom make the mess and roar of love, however difficult, all seem worthwhile.&#x201D;  &#x2014;Karen Karbo, author of The Stuff of Life: A Daughter&#x2019;s Memoir&#x201C;I loved it. Raw, wonderful, honest, brash, truth-telling&#x2014;Falling Apart in One Piece is a story about learning to let go and come to terms with the journey of life. It is a book for anyone whose life has just taken an unexpected turn and who needs to be reminded that not only can they be happy again, but that the human spirit is capable of great resilience.&#x201D; &#x2014;Lee Woodruff, author of Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress
						    	
					    	
						
						Read more
					
	        	
        	
          
              
        	  	  About the Author
        	  
        	  
        		  
        		  
	        		
						
			        		Stacy Morrison is the&#xA0;editor in chief of Redbook magazine. Under&#xA0;her guidance, the magazine has found new vibrancy and relevance for today&#x2019;s generations, winning a Folio award for General Excellence (2005), a Clarion award for General Excellence (2007), and a National Magazine Award nomination for Personal Service (2006). She has appeared as an expert on women, love, sex, money and more on the Today Show, CNN Headline News, CNN Moneyline, and The Early Show, among many other TV programs.&#xA0;Before becoming editor in chief of Redbook magazine,&#xA0;she was Executive Editor at Marie Claire, working on the international advocacy projects, and had previously been the editor in chief of Modern Bride magazine and the venture-funded dot.com/magazine about design, One (which won three Ozzie awards in its short lifespan). She was also a part of the launches of Conde Nast Sports for Women, Time Out New York, and Mirabella magazine.She&#xA0;lives in Brooklyn with her 4-year-old son, Zack, whose father is at&#xA0;the&#xA0;house many, many times a week.
						    	
					    	
						
						Read more
					
	        	
        	
          
              
        	  	  Excerpt. &#xA9; Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
        	  
        	  
        		  
        		  
	        		
						
			        		1We Begin at the End I suppose I should start where it all started. Or, more specifically, started ending. The night Chris told me he was done with our marriage. I can recall exactly what I was doing on the June evening this one-way conversation started: I was standing at the sink in the kitchen area of our one-room first floor, washing a bunch of arugula, my favorite salad green, pushing my hands through the cold water in the salad spinner to shake the dirt loose. I was looking out the window over the sink, marveling at the beautiful backyard of our Brooklyn home: an actual lawn, its bright green grass thick as a carpet; a wood deck; and a pergola with grapevines climbing over it in curlicue abandon. The yard was my favorite thing about our house, a house that we&#x2019;d bought and moved into just five months before on a freezing-cold January day, when our son, Zack, was just five months old. Stationed in his bouncy seat on the floor in the empty living room, he&#x2019;d watched with wide eyes as everything we owned was marched through the front door in big cardboard boxes. I felt lucky to live in this house every single day, especially now that the backyard had come to verdant life. Every evening after I took the subway home to Brooklyn from my job in Manhattan, I&#x2019;d pick up Zack as I walked in the door and nuzzle his soft, sweet skin, say my goodbyes to his nanny, and head out the back door and lie down in the grass while Zack crawled around. I&#x2019;d stare up at the soft blue sky, drink in the smell of the green all around me, and think, I can&#x2019;t believe how lucky we are. I cherished that skyward view: a simple pleasure that made me feel small in the best way, as if I were being cupped in the hands of the universe. Simple and small were antidotes to the way I had been living my life for so long, with a complicated, jam-packed schedule, forging a career in the larger-than-life world of magazine publishing. For me, small was new, and small was good. I finally felt ready to stop going at a dead run, as I had been for so long, to slow down and settle into being happy. Making dinner every night was a new pleasure for me after years of takeout meals at home or at my desk. I looked forward to putting in the half hour of calming busywork that getting dinner on the table entails, once Chris had come home and was able to take Zack off my hands. I&#x2019;d stand in the kitchen and feel my brain slowly empty of the zillions of details and to-dos that make up a day in the office as my hands took over, chopping peppers and onions into just-right dice, whisking a vinaigrette, and washing salad greens. As I poured the water from the salad spinner down the drain that night, I was feeling grateful for everything in my life, but I couldn&#x2019;t ignore Chris&#x2019;s silence pressing against my back. Sometimes people are quiet in a room in a way that feels like company, but today, as with a lot of days in the last few years, and especially since Zack was born, Chris was quiet in a way that felt like an absence. I started to turn around from the sink, wanting to find a way to pull Chris back into the room. I was sure that when I faced the sofa my eyes would find Chris staring blankly into middle distance, ignoring our tiny son, who was playing at his feet. And that was exactly the domestic tableau I beheld. Chris didn&#x2019;t turn to meet my gaze. Instead, as he felt my eyes come to rest on him, he let out a slow, pointed exhale. I bristled, disappointed and annoyed. &#x201C;Want to tell me what you hate so much about your life today?&#x201D; I said, wincing inward slightly as the harsh words came out. And so, still not turning his face, with its long, aquiline nose, huge blue-green eyes, and those full, pink lips I was delirious to call mine when we were first married, he said, simple as pie, &#x201C;I&#x2019;m done.&#x201D; Then he sighed again, and turned slowly to look at me with a flat, empty gaze. &#x201C;I&#x2019;m done with this,&#x201D; he said, gesturing with his hand to encompass our living room, our kitchen, our home, our son, our future, our dreams, every single memory we&#x2019;d ever made together in our thirteen years as a couple, and me, suddenly meaningless me. I felt my face go slack in shock as my vision narrowed to a tunnel centered on Chris&#x2019;s blank face, and everything else went dark. Done. Just like that. From the day Chris made this pronouncement, I felt my whole life click into slow motion as the last moments of my marriage started to slip through the hourglass. Suddenly there was a time bomb ticking loudly in the middle of the house, threatening to smash my life&#x2014;my family, my security, my entire identity&#x2014;into unrecognizable bits. I entered a kind of split-screen crisis mode, shuttling between a panicked search for solutions and the velvety comfort of hiding in denial as I tried to figure out how to defuse the bomb. My mind became a Japanese teahouse: orderly, quiet, with delicate sliding shoji screens to separate my conflicting needs, to make it possible for me to keep on keeping on when it seemed that my husband had just brought everything in our life to a dead stop. As I started to ponder the impossible whys of how he and I had found ourselves here, and the impossible questions of how I would begin again, I slid open and shut the shoji screens in my mind to hide or reveal, a little at a time, what I was feeling&#x2014;the anger, the fear, the bottomless grief&#x2014;so that I could keep myself from being overwhelmed by my emotions. In a hush, I tiptoed around Chris and I tiptoed around myself, afraid to glimpse my reflection in the mirror and see the fear in my eyes. This talk of divorce was coming at a spectacularly bad time. I was the primary breadwinner in our family, and I had recently been fired from a job I loved. Chris and I were still learning how to be parents; our cherubic son was still an infant. We owned this lovely, but needy, house, and the big mortgage that went along with it. And I was interviewing for a big new job, the job of my dreams: taking the helm of Redbook, a huge national magazine that was all about women living their grown-up lives&#x2014;and in no small part, their married lives. The irony was as rich as buttercream frosting on a wedding cake. In the end, I got the job. But I lost the guy. The life we&#x2019;d built together over thirteen years began disassembling itself without my permission as Chris and I started the slow, hard work of breaking up. Then our house began falling apart, too, revealing breaches in the foundation and the roof that the house inspector, my husband, and I had all missed before Chris and I bought it&#x2014;and, we would find out later, that the couple who sold us the house had maybe intended to hide. On my very first day as editor in chief of Redbook, torrents of water poured into the basement of the house. And the floods continued as September-hurricane rains worked their way up the coast and pounded the Northeast, forcing me to undertake a months-long renovation that led to the house&#x2019;s foundation being jackhammered into bits. A few weeks later, the roof and walls of the house started to leak in three or four or five different places, depending on how the wind was blowing. The symbolism of it all was undeniable: water flooded my house for months, as pain was flooding my life. The foundation of my existence was being rocked, as was the foundation of my house. Water followed me everywhere, and so did the tears. I was running a magazine about love and marriage just when everything I thought I knew about either was being put to the test. And I was reinventing that magazine at the same time that I was going through the incredibly painful process of reinventing myself. And it got worse. I had to fire two full-time nannies in a row and so found myself scrambling to patch together child-care arrangements for Zack. And then there would be a beach house fire and the two emergency room visits, and all the heartbreaking ways in which my family and friends couldn&#x2019;t give me what I asked for despite their best intentions, because they had to live their own lives, too. I kept my best game face on at work, desperate not to show weakness either to my staff or to upper management as I spearheaded the magazine&#x2019;s transformation. My friends marveled at how I was able to handle the pressure of the big job while I had such a young son. But the job was, in many ways, the easy part, even though it absorbed so much of my concentration and time: I knew that I knew how to run a magazine, and I trusted my skills and instincts at work. But I was just learning how to trust myself as a mother. And I had absolutely no idea how to handle the crisis in my marriage. Had someone sent me a short story with a heroine living the events that were unfolding in my life, I would have rejected it for being facile and unbelievable. But this wasn&#x2019;t a story, it was my life. And there was no way to get to the other side&#x2014;of the divorce, of the house&#x2019;s flaws, of my own weaknesses, which I&#x2019;d spent a lifetime trying to ignore or exorcise&#x2014;except to live through it all. I know that on many days I watched my divorce unfurl from a safe distance, as if I were perched somewhere over my own shoulder, or standing just behind one of my mental shoji screens, my eyes peeled for the flashes of wisdom that would help me to begin to make sense of the end of everything I thought I knew about myself. Friends and family commented on my calm, wondering why I wasn&#x2019;t angrier. But I didn&#x2019;t want the heated blur that comes from anger. I wanted clarity. I wanted answers. And eventually I realized that anger&#x2014;at my ex, at life, at God, at the house that leaked, the dishes that were dirty, the fate that would seemingly send me plague after plague until I started wondering if maybe I had been cursed&#x2014;would keep me from feeling everything I needed to feel to be able to let go and be free. That is just one of the lessons I learned on my journey through divorce. I ...
						    	
					    	
						
						Read more

## Images

![Falling Apart in One Piece: One Optimist's Journey Through the Hell of Divorce - Image 1](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Rqbzlu8VL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐ 







  
  
    just o.k., missed the boat, lacked depth
  

*by L***S on November 11, 2011*









  
  
    Unfortunately, divorce today is all too common. For the many friends and family I have known who have survived divorce, this scenario was not out of the ordinary and although the words were there, somehow depth was missing. In the "you'll never know why" chapter, it seems this was a missed opportunity to really self-examine and reads like a memoir that any ambitious, type A, single gear (5) person or BOSS could have written where they lament, "hey, although I worked my team almost to death, we got a lot done and I just don't understand why they left me. I just don't understand why the 360 feedback was so bad! Yea, I heard them complain and push back and yea, I mowed right over them to the finish. We had to get it all done right? We had to fit it all in and then some." I actually really felt for Chris. Like he was married to a Boss where he could never set any boundaries until he did. And sometimes a break up is the only way to deal with one track, type A people - job, freinds, sadly a marriage if they won't slow down and you do not share the same desire to keep up with all they want to do around the clock. Really about compatability, not a surprise or shock.  Not to overgeneralize but this is a classic case where it sounded like he was worn out by her need to have it all, and more,. I'm curious if there is something deeper she is trying to fill up that has nothing to do with Chris and on some level, he figured this out and got out early enought to give him self a chance to start over.Save your money. This story is not fully developed yet and will leave you empty in the end.
  


### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    An Insightful, Poignant, Funny Love Story
  

*by S***L on April 8, 2010*









  
  
    Although the book's tagline ("One Optimist's Journey through the Hell of Divorce") might lead you to think this is a book about divorce, don't let it fool you. This is a story about relationship -- to oneself and to others. It's a story about authentic intimacy and deep compassion. It's a story about allowing. About courageously stepping into and through fear. About finding a place of "no blame" -- a place of expansiveness and peace.No, this book is not about divorce. It is really a love story.  It's about the love shared between a woman and a man, a woman and her child, a woman and her friends, a woman and herself ... a woman and her life. (At least that's my take on it!)In "Falling Apart in One Piece," Stacy helps us navigate the dangerous world of anger, the paralyzing world of fear, and the mysterious, gorgeous world of love -- and everything in between.  Although I don't ever recall her using the word "enlightenment," I see this story as a model for my own belief about what enlightenment means: opting for connection over separation, moving from darkness into light, choosing love over fear.  Every time Stacy lets herself feel her anger and then makes a decision to act out of love, I am bolstered  by her courage and able to see my own ability to make those life-affirming choices.I'm not someone who dog-ears pages in books. But if you could see my copy of "Falling Apart in One Piece," you'd notice a whole slew of dog-eared pages! I couldn't help myself. This book is beautifully written -- an awesome combination of raw emotion, humor, insight, and story.  All my dog-ears are places of insight that I want to return to, over and over again. (One of my favorites is: Life "isn't black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. It's everything all at once, many shades of gray, a beautiful, poetic mess.")In between all that insight and introspection is a whole heck of a lot of just-plain-good story. You know, like the kind of story where you truly want to know how the protagonist is gonna get herself out of this one. And you just know she will.I highly recommend this book for anyone who is interested in opening themselves up to what is possible in life.  Stacy's story is written in such a way that I couldn't help but read it as an invitation. Want to come to peace (and joy!) with the inexplicable, imperfect, amazing life you're living? C'mon, I'll show you the way.
  


### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    I admire her candor and introspection
  

*by R***S on June 27, 2017*









  
  
    It was an interesting and in depth account of a business woman's experiences of a marriage, eventual divorce and its prolonged, very painful aftermath. While there are quite a few typos, (surprising for an editor), and you will probably not completely like or agree with the author (who clearly has a strong personality), still you've got to respect and admire her for both her candid writing and introspection about why the break up happened, etc. I didn't always agree with her views or decisions but I must say she kept me engaged and interested in her story....which speaks to her talent as a writer.
  


---

## Why Shop on Desertcart?

- 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016
- 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories
- 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price
- 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members)
- 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection
- ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews

**Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.is/products/41935312-falling-apart-in-one-piece-one-optimists-journey-through-hell](https://www.desertcart.is/products/41935312-falling-apart-in-one-piece-one-optimists-journey-through-hell)

---

*Product available on Desertcart Iceland*
*Store origin: IS*
*Last updated: 2026-02-27*