My Year of Really Bad Dates by Rachel J. Lithgow

Thank you Booksparks and NetGalley for this early review copy. This post contains affiliate links.

I don’t usually reach for memoirs. I live firmly in the romance and women’s fiction section, where someone eventually gets a happy ending. But the blurb for My Year of Really Bad Dates by Rachel J. Lithgow felt so relatable that I couldn’t help myself. A midlife divorcée dealing with trauma, healing, and a whole lineup of terrible dates sounded like something that might help me understand what I’m walking into. I’ve only just dipped a toe into dating apps, and I wanted to see what it’s really like out there.

Rachel writes about rebuilding her life after her divorce and after years of supporting her ex-husband emotionally and financially. In her case it was depression. In mine it was undiagnosed bipolar. So much of her background echoed pieces of my own. Still letting the ex stay at my house when I travel. Being Jewish and from the New York area. Having family in Boca. Sharing similar politics. Reading about her felt like listening to someone I’d meet for lunch and instantly vibe with. Someone who’d show me her dating-app disasters while I tried to figure out my own very first steps into this mess.

“She shared her nicely curated selection of the most absurd profiles that she’d received on her phone, which was impressive in both its sheer number and level of awful.”

But the writing felt a little rough. More like someone’s journal that has the bones of a good book. This might be where my lack of memoir experience shows, because maybe this stream-of-consciousness style is common. It felt choppy at times, both in the sentence flow and the overall structure, bouncing forward and backward in time. That same style also made it feel relatable, like sitting with a friend over lunch, listening to her tell the story exactly as it lived in her head.

What we really see is a woman who is hurting and needs help. I admit I got frustrated a bit that she wasn’t seeking therapy. She had a traumatic marriage, and then obsessed over Joe, a guy she dated post-divorce. He made her happy until he told her he was selling his house and moving to Phoenix with his perky blonde real estate agent. This guy strung her along the whole book. She’d go on a crappy date then text with Joe. She would take any scrap of attention Joe would give her in between the dates with other guys. If I took a shot every time she said ‘Joe’ I would have died of alcohol poisoning.

And honestly, that is exactly the kind of situation that terrifies me about dating. The idea of caring so much about someone who doesn’t care back. The fear of getting wrapped up in the wrong person. I wasn’t expecting the book to make dating look more hopeful. I was just hoping that at least the ending would give me a little more hope for myself. But that’s the romance reader in me.

I also wanted more from the actual dates. More buildup. More dialogue. More cringe and awkwardness. Some stories went there, and I loved those, but others felt like summaries rather than scenes. Since I’m brand new to dating apps, part of me wanted the full play-by-play so maybe I wouldn’t have to experience the same disasters.

“If you have never had the pleasure of using dating apps, allow me to share with you the myriad of new vocabulary words and acronyms that become your reality once you hit the Open button on your app screen. Thank goodness for Rabbi Google, since I was not well versed in such terminology before I began this journey, uphill in a blizzard twelve miles both ways to school.”

A stronger content edit would have tied the memoir together more cleanly. Some threads were introduced and then left hanging. After the quote above, she mentions creating a whole glossary of dating-app terms, then only shares four with the reader. There were moments like that where the book hinted at more but never fully followed through.

Even with my nitpicks, I’m the exact target audience for this memoir. I’ll recommend it to friends, especially single ones in midlife, because the relatability is the real draw. Dating in your fifties and sixties is its own brand of chaos. Health issues. Ex-spouse baggage. Men who haven’t updated their habits since the seventies. Emotional luggage that needs wheels. It’s like men don’t know how to live without a woman to take care of them.

I genuinely enjoyed reading My Year of really Bad Dates. I enjoyed the honesty, the humor, and the relatability of Rachel’s story. But as a romance reader, I couldn’t help wishing it had a happy romantic ending. And definitely NOT with Joe.