The Children of Divorce is Root’s fourth and most recent publication. It is a book with great personal significance to Root and draws on his own experience of becoming a child of divorce in his early twenties. The book argues, in Root’s own words, “that divorce leaves an indelible mark on children, and such a mark that it strikes those who experience it (myself included) at an ontological level, at the level of their being. This book forces us to wrestle with the deepest, rawest, most unsettling questions of those experiencing the divorce of their parents, the question so deep it is often cognitively oppressed: Can a person be at all, now that those who are responsible in their union for creating that person are no longer together? If I am the product of these two people, what does it mean for my very being if these two people have severed and voided their union to each other?”
Root’s book travels through social theory, object relations theory, a history of the family, and theological anthropology. While the material is academically rich, the information is accessable through Root’s use of personal narrative. The book ends with a chapter on why knowing these stories and the effects of divore are important to the church, the community of broken people.
