How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together
288 pages · 65,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · self-help, relationships, nonfiction
How hard is How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together to read?
How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together scores 16 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Written in plain, accessible prose aimed at a general audience. Legal terminology appears only briefly; the dominant register is conversational American English, comparable to mainstream self-help books rather than academic psychology.
- Sentence structure: 20 out of 100
- Sentences are short and punchy, built for quick reading. Sexton favors declarative statements and brief anecdotes over complex subordinate clauses or rhetorical accumulation.
- Abstraction: 32 out of 100
- The book grounds abstract relationship concepts—commitment, trust, resentment—in concrete courtroom stories and client examples. Ideas are accessible but not purely concrete; Sexton draws general principles from specific cases.
- Information density: 28 out of 100
- Each chapter carries a focused insight supported by anecdotes. The pacing is leisurely rather than packed with data; a single idea typically occupies 10-15 pages of illustration and reflection.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- A straightforward nonfiction advice book. Sexton speaks directly to the reader in first person with no ambiguity about voice, purpose, or argument.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- Minimal symbolic or metaphorical layering. The divorce lawyer conceit provides some irony, but the book does not operate on allegorical or symbolic levels.
- Ironic distance: 20 out of 100
- The central premise—a man who dissolves marriages teaches people to sustain them—carries built-in irony, which Sexton acknowledges openly. Beyond this structural irony, the text is sincere and direct.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Self-help by design closes its arguments cleanly. Each chapter ends with an actionable takeaway. Nothing is left intentionally ambiguous.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- Conventional chapter-based structure with a clear thesis-example-conclusion format. No experimental or nonlinear elements.
How How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together is regarded
How to Stay in Love: A Divorce Lawyer's Guide to Staying Together holds a literary regard score of 12 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.