Reading Anatomy of a Divorce is a bit like watching a slow-motion car accident. You know it is going to be bad, but you cannot take your eyes off the scene in case you miss something. Tansley writes well and gives a vivid portrait of the disintegration of his marriage and the subsequent battle before the courts to get access to his children. Anatomy of a Divorce takes you inside a typical rocky marriage and reveals all of the warts and blemishes of that relationship to give the reader a voyeuristic feeling that they are watching something just a little bit dirty that should be kept private.

If that were all there were to the book, it would not be worth reading. However, the author, Brantford resident Robert Tansley, tries to bring some insight into the father's perspective when a marriage goes into the toilet. From Tansley's perspective, divorce is a violation of almost every aspect of fairness and due process. The book chronicles his journey from loving father, to supplicant before the courts, to weekend father. It is a process that Tansley has found intensely painful and perhaps the book is something of a catharsis to purge his anger at what he perceives as unfair treatment by a system geared toward giving custody to women and treating fathers as a convenient wallet to pay for everything.

“I was alone. I had gone from a busy house full of children, laughter, tears, breakfasts with alphabet cereal, bedtime cuddles with words of love, cartoons and routine to being alone, lost in the silence of it all. I was in a system of affidavits, motions, applications and processes of discovery. It was completely adversarial.” “I remembered Hemingway's words: 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.' I needed to take some risks. I was playing  a game by the rules, but the rules were designed for me to lose.”

The book details Tansley's battle to gain access to his children and to carve out a normal life for himself and his family. If there is any weakness to the book, it is that the reader comes away with the impression that there is more to this story than we are being told. The actions of his ex-wife seem very bizarre. Although Tansley tries, in passing, to put her side of the story before the reader, it rings hollow to my ear and I would have liked to understand her side of things better. As in any dispute, there are three sides, his side, her side, and the truth. The truth is usually the first casualty in any relating of the events of a divorce. Where Tansley comes closest to the truth is in the difficulties that fathers have when faced with spousal conflict before the courts. Perhaps that is the real theme of his book after all.

Anatomy of Divorce . . . .