Divorce is big business, and this isn’t limited to the family courts and the wide range of cogs in the machinery that destroys families. When women aren’t destroying their own families, they like to read, watch, and think about other women destroying their families. But while the demand is enough for online magazines like Huffington Post to create a separate section just for divorce, there is an army of women who want to be writers. Moreover, with nearly half of all marriages ending in divorce, divorcées are a dime a dozen.
Laura Lifshitz got her start as a professional divorcée at Huffington Post Divorce back in late January of this year. Her maiden post Why You Should Date My Ex-Husband was a passable contribution to the category, but not good enough to make her stand out. In the six weeks that followed she cranked out another 12 posts for Huffington Post Divorce, but being productive in a crowded genre isn’t enough. Like all professional divorcées, Lifshitz needs something extra, something that makes her stand out in the din of all of the other divorcées writing about the destruction of their family.
Last week Lifshitz found her niche. She took a page from Susan Gregory Thomas’ playbook and wrote about how much her frivolous divorce is harming her young child. This is always a crowd pleaser, allowing women fantasizing about divorce to imagine the divorce causing immense pain to innocent children. While Lifshitz is no Susan Gregory Thomas, her piece ‘I Miss My Daddy. Divorce Stinks.’ was enough to get her published in the New York Times mommyblog, Motherlode.
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