Her resentment is towards herself and no one else. This book is inspiring in a way it probably wasn’t meant to be Mirvis wants everyone to live a life of truth and honesty because she didn’t. Mirvis longs for freedom so much that you want it for her - and then look internally and want it for yourself, too. While she hangs onto her old life, she desperately wants to start a new one. Mirvis realizes her Orthodoxy is so ingrained in her - going back generations - that shedding this skin will take a great deal of strength.

She toils through her decisions and her emotions in a way that only a student of Talmud can. The book is a form of therapy, a catharsis. Soon however, you realize that she is discovering things about herself along with the reader her thoughts are not fully formed until they hit the page. Mirvis’s thoughts bombard you, the words riding on her train of thought. Initially, the book may take some time to get into. A novel is left unfinished for years because she fears that completing it would require her to make difficult decisions in her own life. Her internal dilemma even affects her writing. As the author of such an introspective memoir, Mirvis clearly lived a surface-level existence for too many years. The questions Mirvis asks herself - about what her marriage means to her, how to deal with her kids (who still live in the community from which she has been shunned), and what led her to this juncture - are incredibly personal and yet highly relatable. Mirvis hated it and was begging for a way out. She and her husband had three children together, moved to a suburb of Boston, and created a life exactly like that of all other couples in their community. She married young and followed all the strict rules that young Orthodox couples must follow. She grew up in a small town, attended an Orthodox school, participated in the Orthodox Youth Movement, and went to an Orthodox seminary in Israel Mirvis felt like her life was laid out for her - foretold by her ancestors. In her recent memoir, The Book of Separation, Mirvis details her realization that Orthodoxy was not her home, even though she was convinced it was for so long. The same factors burdened Mirvis’s own life. Tradition and responsibility hang heavily over each of her characters.

Her novels focus on family and romantic relationships, on the Jewish Orthodox world, and on how those two things can affect a person.

Tova Mirvis has spent her literary career writing from personal experience.

The book of separation by tova mirvis