About the author

Liudvikas Benediktas is the pen name of a European writer, entrepreneur and father of two.

For twenty years he was, by every external measure, a man who had it handled. He built companies and led teams across borders; he stood on stages; he was the one people pointed to, the son who performed strength and faith and generosity for a room that was always watching. Then, in the middle of a life that looked complete, the whole structure came down at once, and he found himself alone in an empty flat at forty-three, discovering that he did not know the first thing about the man he had spent his life being.

This book is what he wrote during that collapse. Not afterward, from a safe distance, but while it was still happening, in real time. It is the record of one death and one birth: the man who lived to be admired dying, and a quieter, harder, more honest man being built in his place.

He writes about masculinity, fatherhood, rebuilding and the interior life of men in a crisis they did not choose. He lives in Northern Europe, with his two sons close by.

Why a pen name

Not to hide, and not to sell mystery. There is another adult in this story and there are two children, and none of them agreed to be written about. A pen name is the one thing that lets the book be honest about the author without spending their privacy to do it. What is written here about him is true. What is not written here about them is deliberate. The reasoning is set out in full on the privacy page.

This is not professional advice

He is not a therapist, a lawyer or a financial adviser, and nothing in this book is any of those things. It is one man's account of one crisis, written from the inside while it was happening. Where the book touches money, the legal process or your health, it is a description of what he did, not an instruction for what you should. Divorce law differs in every country. If you are in danger, or you cannot see a way through, speak to someone qualified where you live, today.

Works cited in the book

The book leans on a small number of authors, and it quotes them at length. Their work is worth far more than the quotations here, and it is worth reading whole:

• M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled — on love as an act rather than a feeling, and on discipline.
• Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal — on the wound underneath the behaviour, and on what a body carries.
• Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning — on the stand a man takes toward unavoidable suffering.
• Robert Greene, The Laws of Human Nature — on reading people accurately when the pressure is on.
• The Bible — quoted throughout, most often Matthew 7:24–27, Psalm 46:10, 1 John 3:18, 1 John 4:18 and John 12:24.

Elsewhere

He also talks, in Lithuanian, on YouTube: @manoliudvikasbenediktas. Same person, same pen name, a different language and a longer conversation.

Contact

Readers write back, and he reads all of it. The address is hello@nobodytellsyoudivorce.com. The whole book stays free to read at nobodytellsyoudivorce.com, and the PDF is free too.