Essays

Relationships that never leave you.

About Fight School,
the book

“Pain is the best teacher, but no one wants to take his class.”

  General Choi, founder Taekwondo

Fight School is a personal exploration of love, rebirth, and uppercuts.

My husband and I owned an award-winning ad agency together, our lives fused by creativity. He was the visionary, I the ballast. But he began to unravel: imagining himself as a savior, filling our home with strange packages. As refuge, I took up taekwondo and poured my rage into martial arts. I couldn’t win an argument with my husband, but I could take a blow to the head. He needed me, how could I leave him? And then I remembered the first lesson in taekwondo.

Fight School joins the conversations of divorce, love and choices in Splinters by Leslie Jamison, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, by Maggie Smith and, most poignantly, by In Love from Amy Bloom. How can we untangle our complicated feelings? What battles should we choose; when and how should we fight for independence and our families, and when should we let go, despite love?