How to Get Divorced by 30 - Sascha Rothchild (2010)

Surprisingly engaging memoir (subtitled My Misguided Attempt at a Starter Marriage). Outlines in chapters the various steps she semi-unwittingly went through to get divorced by 30 (including "Keep Your Belongings Separate", "Include Your Spouse in a Performance Where You Read Off Your List of Sexual Partners", and "Marry an Actor."

Rothchild, a struggling writer living in L.A. who married a struggling actor, has a lovely, dry sense of humor, and a realistic, healthily critical self-image (she includes quotes from her "self-indulgent" diaries).

 What I loved about this book, besides its insightful look at love and romance and what we tell ourselves we want and need, is that I ended up actually wanting to know more about her. Often, with memoirs, I'm like, enough already--I don't need to know any more about your grandmother, your birth or your sixth-grade teacher.  But her home life (as well as her romantic life) is really fascinating, with a strangely detached mother and siblings who we don't get to know well enough. And we only get little glimpses of it, as well as her semi-turbulent childhood. I love leaving a memoir wanting more! Plus, it is really funny.

The Hypnotist's Love Story by Liane Moriarty (2011)

Liane Moriarty is one of those authors that just speak to me.  She has such wonderful insights into character and relationships and builds such compelling, believable characters.

This novel is about Ellen O'Farrell, a hypnotherapist in her mid-30s, who just met a promising new man.  Things are going well until he tells her that he has a stalker--a woman he broke up with three years ago.  The story is told in alternating sections from Ellen's (3rd person) POV and Saskia's 1st person POV (the stalker).  Slightly quirky and very endearing, I think Liane Moriarty is a great readalike for Maeve Binchy.  Just change the setting from Ireland to Australia!  But keep the compelling characters and relationships and satisfying plots.

"I was stunned.  I'm not sure why.  I think I just never expected him to be important enough to make any significant changes in his life, but of course, he doesn't know that he's only a minor character in my life.  He's the star of his own life and I'm the minor character.  And fair enough too."

See also:  What Alice Forgot and Three Wishes.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012)

I adore Gillian Flynn and I loved this book.  Her third novel, and an immediate bestseller, lived up to all of the hype, and to my fond memories of reading her other two books. 

The story is told by a husband whose wife goes missing, and also through journal entries of the wife previous to the disappearance.  And yet we don't know the whole story.  Chilling and surprising, and includes some really great, insightful and often funny writing.  See below:

"I am not interested in being set up.  I need to be ambushed, caught unawares, like some sort of feral love-jackal.  I'm too self-conscious otherwise.  I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I've basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I'm dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me.  There's a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth."

"Mainly, I will admit, I smile because he's gorgeous.  Distractingly gorgeous, the kind of looks that make your eyes pinwheel, that make you want to just address the elephant--'You know you're gorgeous, right?'--and move on with the conversation.  I bet dudes hate him:  He looks like the rich-boy villain in an 80s teen movie--the one who bullies the sensitive misfit, the one who will end up with a pie in the puss, the whipped cream wilting his upturned collar as everyone in the cafeteria cheers."

 A page-turning novel that absolutely refuses to get off the bestseller lists.  Good for Flynn!  Write more books!