Six months after her marriage came to an end, Monica Heisey – the author of the chaotic new divorce novel Really Good, Actually – went out for drinks with a man who’d also just split from his long-term partner. She found herself asking him big, morbid questions. “Do you ever feel like you’ve just broken up with someone who’s gonna die one day, and you’d promised to love them until they did? And now you won’t?’” Her date, meanwhile, was already living with a new girlfriend. “He was like, ‘Wow, I’d never thought about that even once’.”
Heisey, a peppy Canadian with a triangular fringe and a face like Drew Barrymore’s, doesn’t know if it’s reductive to say that this particular encounter spoke to a gender gap. But she’s noticed that women seem to navigate divorce differently than men. It’s one of the reasons she wanted to write Really Good, Actually, which charts a year in the life of 28-year-old Toronto academic Maggie, whose marriage has just fallen apart. Her ex Jon, whose presence lingers ghost-like over the book, seems to move on rapidly. Meanwhile, Maggie spirals. There are failed creative projects. Endless conversations with her ex-husband’s answering machine. Disappointing three-ways.
