This American Life producer Nancy Updike on a family where the father was one kind of sissy and the son was another kind, and how the family was destroyed despite the fact that no one wanted it to be.

A woman, who got in a car accident and was in a coma for 52 days, woke up having forgotten the last two years of her life — during which she'd divorced her husband. Producer Miki Meek spent a week with this family, in the midst of their difficult situation.  (14 minutes)

Ira talks with divorce mediator Barry Berkman about why it's bad when the justice system gets involved in a break-up.

Jeanne Darst was 16 when her parents split up. But it turned out they just weren't too skilled at the whole divorce thing.

In the wake of a break-up, writer Starlee Kine finds so much comfort in break-up songs that she decides to try and write one herself—even though she has no musical ability whatsoever. For some help, she goes to a rather surprising expert on the subject: Phil Collins.

The classifieds are populated by people in flux. People selling stuff from old lives in transition new ones.

Susan Burton rereads her parents' divorce papers—the fine print that changed her life forever.

Susan Burton rereads her parents' divorce papers—the fine print that changed her life forever.

A man discovers that his wife is cheating on him, and turns for advice to someone he's sure will have his back: his lawyer in the separation proceedings. Unfortunately for him, this is the worst person he could be turning to for advice...because his wife is cheating with the lawyer.

Host Ira Glass talks with This American Life producer Julie Snyder about a personal regime change that happened when she was a kid, after her parents got divorced and her stepdad came on the scene. She says that by the time her parents separated, literature on what to tell the children was everywhere, and the kids took it relatively well.

Reporter Scott Carrier does a story about Harvey "Job" Matusow.

A collection of small stories, all on the the theme introduced in the prologue—the first few months after the divorce, and suddenly, your parents are less composed, more flawed, and more human, than perhaps you've ever seen them.

Starlee Kine gets answers about her parents marriage from her dad...after a lifetime of mystery. She and her sister had wanted her parents to divorce since they were little.

When Gene Cheek was ten years old, his mother began dating a black man. It was 1961, in North Carolina.

The chronicle of a family that unravelled. Debra Gwartney loved her two oldest daughters like she loved herself.

Over the course of his life, Keith Aldrich was a child of the Depression; an aspiring Hollywood actor; a self-styled Beat writer, a member of the New York literati, and then a hippie. Then in the 80's, he became a born-again Christian.

When Emily Helfgot was ten, her dad was a sex therapist on a call-in radio show, which thoroughly embarrassed her. He also kept a stack of Playboy magazines in their house, in plain sight.

Audio artist Jay Allison and writer Dan Robb present an audio montage on the moment Robb's parents divorced.

We hear Billie Holliday, Keely Smith and Leo Reisman (with Anita Boyer) asking the musical question, "What Is This Thing Called Love?" And, reporter Sean Cole talks about love with Joe and Helen Garland, who fell in love during World War II, but married other people. Thirty years later they met again, felt the same love they felt when they were young, divorced their respective spouses, and finally married each other.

The story of several huge companies that accidentally got put into the babysitting business in a big, big way because of snow on December 26, 1988. Every year on the day after Christmas, divorced kids all over America fly from one parent to the other.

Leah remembers when her parents got divorced and her dad, a farmer in North Dakota, moved to an apartment in town. It was cramped and ugly, and it had a Murphy bed that made a horrible creak when you brought it down from the wall.

Mark Oppenheimer reports on agunah in the Orthodox Jewish community. An agunah is a woman whose husband refuses to give her a divorce – in Hebrew it means "chained wife." If you're an Orthodox Jew, strictly following Jewish law, the only real way to get divorced is if your husband agrees to hand you a piece of paper called a get.