The Ragged Way People Fall out of Love by Elizabeth Cox

The Ragged Way People Fall out of Love by Elizabeth Cox

Molly Hanner's marriage to William is slowly unraveling, and the pulls of entropy this exerts upon them and their three children painfully instruct Molly in the many ways people barely miss loving each other. But divorce is only a catalyst in Molly's life. Amazed at the weight of her family's hurt and at her isolation within it, Molly, painter and student of astronomy, shifts her gaze outward -- to the stars, to the images she paints, to the world around her -- looking for an order that will contain the disarray of her own life.

Elizabeth Cox is the author of four novels: The Ragged Way Humans Fall Out of Love, Night Talk (winner of the Lillian Smith Award and a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), Familiar Ground, and The Slow Moon, as well as poetry and short story collections. She's received the Robert Penn Warren Award and the North Carolina Fiction Award, as well as membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Cox has taught creative writing at Duke University, the University of Michigan, the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Tufts University, Boston University, MIT, Bennington College, and, most recently, Wofford College, where she and her husband, C. Cox, shared the John Cobb Chair. Michael Curtis is the Atlantic's fiction editor.