By Anastasia Royal

In the novel Undoing I Do, narrator Claire McCloud relives moments of a once-promising marriage. These moments—ecstatic, mundane, intimate, and surprisingly funny—give way to a single, explosive moment when Claire is left alone to create her future. Claire is a truly multi-layered heroine: an artist, musician, wife and mother. Her experiences interlock and unlock what went wrong. Looping back and forth in time like a mobius strip, her side of the story is always upbeat, even when elegiac. Finding humor in most situations is her expertise; her two children are her inspiration. Looking at her life from many angles—most of them sharp—Claire reshapes the pieces in the puzzle of lost love. And her story—like love itself—is seductive and compelling. As her identity crumbles along with her relationship to artist Tobin Kleinherz, her German husband, she whirls around to re-examine the debris, hoping to pull a new self from the wreckage.

Novelist Anastasia Royal has created a soul-baring story with honesty, humor, a healthy dose of libido, and an inventive, lyrical style.

Redbook Magazine, p 64

Undoing I Do by Anastasia Royal [Book]

In this poignant novel, Royal tells of a marriage gone wrong, a hostile divorce, and the pain of single motherhood so beautifully that you won’t know whether to cry for her character’s broken heart or swoon over the lyrical prose.

If only it were as difficult to fall in love as it is to fall out of it, then perhaps the bitter recriminations and personal vendettas that often lead to devastating divorce would never occur. In the case of Claire and Tobin, the halcyon days of their courtship naturally resulted in a storybook marriage that would take them from Europe to America, produce two beautiful children, launch satisfying careers, and establish them in a home of their own. Then one day Tobin walked out, and though the clues were there all along the petty bickering, the selfish demands Claire was genuinely shocked to learn that the love of her life didn’t love her after all. Her emotional anguish is total, debilitating, heart wrenching to behold, and Royal limns the raw depths of Claire’s suffering with both disarming candor and delicate subtlety. Poignant, painful, lyrical, Royal’s treatment of this lamentably common condition is astonishingly uncommon in the sheer force of its sympathetic honesty.— Carol Haggas Copyright 2007 Booklist

“Few have picked up the pieces of broken love with more élan than Claire McCloud, divorce-casualty, struggling mom, and a let-it-all-hang-out iconoclast who will shock and delight you…shaping so iridescent a tale from divorce’s dark matter takes a special writing gene, and evidently, Anastasia Royal has whole strands of it.”

— Arthur Plotnik, Author of Spunk & Bite:
A Writer’s Guide to Bold Contemporary Style

“Calling Anastasia Royal’s stunning and supple roman a clef a ‘first novel’ is like calling the Hope Diamond a shiny little rock. As savage and sharp as it is lovely, with as many facets as life itself, Undoing I Do is a perfect gem of a book. Told with a surgeon’s eye for detail, the narrative employs all manner of prose and poetry to slice through the telling episodes of a marriage coming undone. It tackles big themes, and at times put me in mind of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, but the things that linger most are the tiny sensual details. A new, important voice in literature is born.”