About Breakup

Forged in divorce hell

In this compelling and brutally honest memoir Leo Averbach draws you into the cauldron of marital disintegration.

Written as a journal in real time, Breakup interweaves the writer’s daily ordeal and the couple’s ongoing travails with the insights and experience of psychotherapy.

Breakup chronicles Averbach’s struggle to cope with his wife’s betrayal and its implications for their family. His first-person narrative, which is confessional and deeply reflective, reveals everything in describing the acrimony and emotions as the marriage falls apart.

But what begins as a tale of anguish and despair becomes a story of transformation and regeneration, leading Averbach to a new life.

Breakup is an unusual divorce memoir. Divorce is Breakup’s prime concern but what elevates this from a personal account of a common occurrence into a story with wider significance is the upheaval surrounding the breakup.

The tragedy of marital disintegration triggers Averbach’s soul-searching, forcing him into a process of change, and driving him to seek a resolution. As a series of entries taken directly from the author’s diary, Breakup is doubly unusual.

Contents | Look inside

Breakup is:

A candid divorce memoir written by a regular guy.
Written as a journal in the first person.
A careful weave of two themes: an intimate, deeply reflective divorce narrative and a perceptive, affecting account of psychotherapy.
A warts-and-all account of divorce.
An unusually frank account of one man’s psychotherapy.
Blessed with a positive outcome as Averbach learns to release his demons and move on.
A meticulous case study of divorce and recovery.

About the Author

Leo Averbach was born and raised in South Africa, lived on a kibbutz in Israel for five years before moving to London. He was married for twenty years, fathered three children and got divorced. After remarrying he returned to Israel and now lives in the Jerusalem hills, where he has his pottery studio.