Thoughts Before Sleep

Thoughts Before Sleep, a dark romantic comedy, tells the story of the end of Judith and Clark’s thirty-year marriage and the beginning of new lives for the unhappy couple.

Fifty-eight-year-old Judith is trying to decide whether her loneliness, sadness, and anger are enough to overcome her fears about getting a divorce. Judith, who refers to herself as Sleeping Former Beauty, who has spent years wandering their twelve-room house listening to self-help books, begins going on-line to scroll through Tinder’s looking for a man who could make her feel loved again. She begins meeting men for lunch. Even as she evaluates her possibilities among the widowers, divorced, and liars, she fights her feelings of how these damaged, lonely men are looking at her, overweight and aged as she is.
Judith’s husband Clark, who depends upon a well-developed sense of duty both to get him through his tension-filled workweek days in Virginia, spends his weekends back in Rhode Island riding his lawnmower and talking to their dog Deebs rather than trying to communicate with the half-ghost of the woman who once infatuated him.

Over the course of a year Judith and Clark divorce, endure emotional confusion, make false starts and stupid decisions, wound and are wounded, lose friends and make enemies, and come to favor black humor and gin as necessary tools as they struggle to cobble together new lives without each other.