The Third Option, by Beca Salmon

Divorce comes for many of us, sometimes after years of quiet resignation or escalating fights. Sometimes after love slowly slips away. And sometimes, it’s a trainwreck.

From the rubble, Beca Salmon shares a memoir of an unwanted divorce, a love letter to loss, and a fierce reckoning of how she was blindsided by the end of her seventeen-year marriage.

Set against a year of dark revelations—cheating, lying, and stealing—this book braids the raw, intimate details of a dissolving relationship with a deeper examination of the chaotic rhythm of the victim-perpetrator cycle. This dance is a tired paradigm used to create blame and hold people captive to harm. Those of us who carry a personal legacy of childhood abuse are offered two options as adults: be a victim or victimize others. The Third Option asks: What if there’s another way?