01
The Beginning of the End
Told in the order it actually happened, which is not the order anyone tells it in later.
A memoir by Vivian Tyler
Love
Rehab
A Memoir of Divorce, Resilience, and Unexpected Joy
Love broke. Life didn't. A memoir about the end of a marriage, the eleven strange months after it, and the humor that showed up uninvited and stayed.
Hi, I'm Vivian.
Writer. Divorce survivor. Reluctant expert on starting over — and on the good pan.
Featured in
The AtlanticDeath, Sex & MoneyKirkus ReviewsWNYC
The Book
Divorce was not the plan. Neither was the punchline.
Love Rehab starts on the worst afternoon of Vivian Tyler's life and refuses to stay there. It is the paperwork and the pity casseroles, the friend who says the wrong thing at exactly the right time, and the morning you realize you are going to be fine — before you were ready to admit it.
It is a book for the woman sitting in her car in a parking lot, deciding what happens next. Honest about the wreckage, unwilling to be solemn about it, and clear that the next chapter is genuinely more interesting than the last one.
Symptoms may include…
Side effects reported by readers of Love Rehab.
Questioning everything, starting with the wallpaper
Laughing at terrible timing
Rediscovering the parts of yourself you filed away
Sleeping diagonally, on purpose
Joy, arriving where you didn't expect it
A look inside
Chapter glimpses
02
Things Nobody Tells You
What the lawyers leave out, and what the group chat gets confidently wrong.
03
Learning to Laugh Again
The first joke that landed, made by a friend at exactly the wrong moment.
04
Starting Over
One good pan. A bed with no assigned sides. Dating without pretending.
05
Unexpected Joy
Resilience, unglamorously: the small repeated choices that rebuilt a life.
Read the opening pages.
Read an excerpt →Excerpt
Chapter One · page 3
Go ahead. Read a little.
The dress was still in the garment bag when I carried it out to the alley. I had imagined this moment as something cinematic — wind, a lifted chin, a soundtrack. What actually happened was that the bag caught on the dumpster latch and I stood there in the July heat, sweating, negotiating with a zipper.
Nobody tells you that the end of a marriage is mostly logistics. The grief arrives on schedule, but it has to take its turn behind the account transfers and the mail forwarding and the question of who keeps the good pan. I answered the question of the good pan on a Tuesday. I cried about it on a Thursday, in a parking lot, with a coffee going cold in the cup holder.
This is the part I want to tell you about: not the ending, which everyone can picture, but the eleven months after it, when I had no idea what I was doing and did it anyway.
— Vivian
Vivian Tyler
About Vivian
And then there's Vivian.
Vivian Tyler is a writer whose work sits where grief and comedy overlap, because that is where most of real life happens. She writes about marriage, divorce, healing and the unglamorous mechanics of starting over.
Love Rehab is her first book, written over the eleven months it describes and the three years it took to be funny about them.
Available for interviews, book clubs and events — get in touch.
“I did not become a better person. I became a much more interesting one.”
What readers are saying
“Funny in the way only honest books are funny.”
Advance praise
“I handed it to my sister before I finished the last chapter.”
Early reader
“A memoir about resilience that never once lectures you.”
Book club reader
“I read it in one sitting and then called my best friend.”
Early reader
Buy the Book
Love Rehab is available now.
Hardcover, ebook and audiobook. Ask for it at your local bookshop, or choose a retailer.