Rachel Lithgow

Reviewed

June 12, 2026

Read Time

9 min read

Age & reading levelAdult

Reader rating

4.1

· 54 Amazon ratings

reader ratings, not a LuvemBooks score

$14.63 on Amazon

Curated & edited by

LuvemBooks Editorial

How we create our reviews →

Share This Review

Our review

My Year of Really Bad Dates

Name: My Year of Really Bad Dates
Author: Rachel Lithgow

My Year of Really Bad Dates by Rachel Lithgow Review: A Raw, Funny Midlife Memoir

by Rachel Lithgow

Rachel Lithgow's debut memoir, published by She Writes Press on November 11, 2025, chronicles her year of spectacularly ill-fated online dates in the aftermath of a gutting breakup—while simultaneously navigating a 22-year divorce, single motherhood, career reinvention, and a PTSD diagnosis. Kirkus Reviews awarded it their "Get It" verdict, calling it "funny, honest, and heart-wrenching," and the book delivers exactly what its title promises: the dates are, indeed, really bad.

$14.63 on Amazon

Adultverbal abuse (family and in-laws) · PTSD and trauma recovery

LuvemBooks Verdict

Best for

Midlife readers — particularly women navigating divorce, re-entry into dating, grief, or identity reinvention after 40 — who want those experiences rendered with honesty and wit rather than reassuring gloss.

Worth it if

You can hold comedy and real emotional weight in the same hand — if a memoir that is simultaneously a dating chronicle, a divorce narrative, a grief story, and a PTSD recovery account sounds like ambition rather than overreach.

Skip if

You're coming for a breezy, laughs-only dating comedy and would prefer to skip the genuinely heavy emotional terrain — the darkness here is real and Lithgow does not soften it, and Joe's recurring drift in and out of the narrative resists the clean resolution some readers prefer.

What readers & critics say

Kirkus Reviews awarded the book their "Get It" endorsement and called it "funny, honest, and heart-wrenching," singling out Lithgow's humor and her unflinching portrayal of family trauma as particular strengths for a debut memoir. BookLife (via barnesandnoble.com) described it as "a raw, bitingly funny, and heart-bruised memoir," while the book blog Mandy's Book Nook called it "a gem — a breezy, hilarious, and surprisingly moving account."

“Funny, honest, and heart-wrenching; true to the title, the dates are really bad.”

— Kirkus Reviews

Sources: Kirkus Reviews, Mandy's Book Nook, Ana's Attic, The StoryGraph

4.1from 54 Amazon ratings— reader ratings, not a LuvemBooks score

Ask LuvemBooks

Was this helpful?

My Year of Really Bad Dates: A Memoir by Rachel Lithgow is a debut memoir that uses a year of spectacularly ill-fated online dates as the scaffolding for a much deeper reckoning — one that takes in a 22-year divorce, single motherhood, career reinvention, and a PTSD diagnosis rooted in family trauma. Kirkus Reviews awarded it their "Get It" verdict, calling it "funny, honest, and heart-wrenching," a three-part description that accurately signals its tonal range: the humor is wry and specific, but the darkness is real and unsparing. Readers who come purely for comedic dating anecdotes should know the emotional stakes run considerably deeper than the title alone suggests.

Is it worth reading?: For the right reader, the answer is a clear yes. Kirkus Reviews awarded the memoir their 'Get It' verdict — a meaningful endorsement for a debut — and praised it as 'funny, honest, and heart-wrenching.' The humor is grounded and specific: Lithgow's invention of 'dating math,' an algorithm she mentally applies to every profile to pre-correct for the gap between stated and actual age and height, is the kind of wry comedic craft that earns genuine laughs. The caveat is that the book is not a breezy dating comedy; the descriptions of verbal abuse from her in-laws and her own family are, per Kirkus, 'hair-raising,' and the emotional weight of grief, divorce, and PTSD recovery is real and unsparing.
Similar books: Readers drawn to My Year of Really Bad Dates will find strong companions in the curated memoirs below. Linda I. Meyers' The Tell: A Memoir and Strangers Again: A Memoir of Marriage, Betrayal, and Becoming Whole share its unflinching examination of fractured intimate relationships and the long work of becoming whole after them. Out of the Corner: A Memoir by Jennifer Grey and Finding Him, Finding Me: A Memoir About Love, Laughter offer parallel explorations of reinvention and identity in the aftermath of major life upheaval. For readers drawn to the PTSD and family-trauma thread in Lithgow's memoir, Tara Westover's Educated: A Memoir — a portrait of self-reconstruction after a chaotic and damaging upbringing — makes a powerful companion read.
Who should read this?: My Year of Really Bad Dates is designed for readers who have navigated midlife upheaval — divorce, re-entry into dating, grief, career reinvention, or the particular disorientation of starting over after 40 — and who want those experiences rendered with honesty and wit rather than reassuring gloss. It will resonate especially with women in or past their 40s who recognize the specific indignities of online dating after a long relationship, but the emotional breadth of the memoir — PTSD, single motherhood, family trauma — extends its appeal to anyone who has had to rebuild a sense of self after a period of sustained loss. Readers who prefer breezy, comedic memoirs with minimal emotional weight should approach with adjusted expectations.
What are the main themes?: The memoir operates on several overlapping layers simultaneously. The most visible is the comedy of modern online dating — each bad date functions as both comic relief and emotional marker — but running beneath it are themes of grief (Lithgow's father's death and the end of a significant relationship), divorce and its aftermath, single motherhood, and PTSD rooted in a chaotic family upbringing. A significant thread is Lithgow's RTT work with Dr. Z — Rapid Transformational Therapy, described in the memoir as 'a combination of hypnosis, talk therapy, and coaching' — which becomes the mechanism through which she confronts what Kirkus calls 'the darkest, saddest, angriest parts of herself.' Undergirding all of it is a theme of reinvention: what it means to rebuild a professional and personal identity in midlife from near-scratch.
Any content warnings?: Readers should be aware that despite the comedic title, My Year of Really Bad Dates contains passages of real emotional darkness. Kirkus Reviews describes accounts of verbal abuse from both Lithgow's in-laws and her own family as 'hair-raising,' and the memoir includes a formal PTSD diagnosis rooted in family trauma. The book also deals with grief (a father's death), the emotional fallout of divorce, and the particular disorientation of a breakup with someone described as the first person ever to make Lithgow feel completely safe. The darkness is not decorative — it is the book's emotional core — and readers sensitive to these themes should approach with that awareness.
Is this a strong debut?: By the available critical measure, yes. A Kirkus Reviews 'Get It' verdict is a meaningful endorsement at any career stage, and earning it on a debut memoir — one that attempts to hold comedy, grief, PTSD recovery, and divorce simultaneously without collapsing into a single note — represents a genuine achievement. The review also notes an unusual origin: the book began as a fifty-page poem before evolving through hundreds of pages of further poetry and finally into prose, a genesis that may explain the emotional intensity that distinguishes it from more conventional memoir writing.

Summarize this book

Is it worth reading?

Who should read this?

What are the main themes?

Any content warnings?

Is this a strong debut?

Summarize this book

Months before her 50th birthday, Rachel Lithgow is blindsided when Joe — the first man she describes as ever making her feel completely safe — abruptly ends their relationship to move to Phoenix and move in with a woman he met a week prior. What follows is a year of re-entering the online dating pool, producing a parade of dates that range from baffling to genuinely alarming: a man who still lived with his ex-wife and her boyfriend, several men preoccupied with their own anatomy, and one so unsettling Lithgow slipped out through a back exit at an oyster bar. Running alongside the dating chronicle are the final stages of dissolving a fraught 22-year marriage, raising two teenagers, career reinvention after leaving a thirty-year professional life, and — after her friend Leah connects her with Dr. Z, a practitioner of Rapid Transformational Therapy — a PTSD diagnosis rooted in a chaotic family upbringing.

Follow up

What happens with Joe?

How did the book come to be written?

Who published this memoir?

Synthesized from verified book data & published reviews · How we review

Ask LuvemBooks

What would you like to know about My Year of Really Bad Dates?

Answers come from our editorial notes on this book. If we haven't covered something, we'll say so.

Readers often ask

Our Review

We review the evidence: published critics, reader verdicts and BookTube reviews, gathered and weighed with AI assistance and edited by LuvemBooks, rather than one reader's first-hand take.

A debut memoir that earns its title on every count, My Year of Really Bad Dates is as much a story of inner reckoning as it is a catalogue of romantic disasters.

What the Book Is — and What Actually Happens

Months before her 50th birthday, Rachel Lithgow is blindsided when Joe — whom she describes as "the first man [she] ever dated to make [her] feel completely safe at any moment" — abruptly ends their relationship to move to Phoenix and move in with a woman he met a week prior. What follows, as Lithgow chronicles in this debut memoir published by She Writes Press, is a year of re-entering the online dating pool with results that range from baffling to genuinely alarming.

The parade of dates includes a man going on his first outing since middle school who still lived with his ex-wife and her boyfriend, several men preoccupied with their own anatomy, one who was cheap in the extreme, one who was wealthy in the extreme, and one so unsettling that Lithgow, as Kirkus Reviews recounts, "excused [her]self to go to the bathroom and exited through the little-known back way out of the oyster bar." Joe, meanwhile, continued to drift in and out of her life throughout the year, compounding the emotional turbulence.

The Deeper Stakes: Divorce, Grief, and a PTSD Diagnosis

The bad dates are only one layer of what Lithgow is processing. Running concurrently are the final stages of dissolving a fraught 22-year marriage, raising two teenagers, and rebuilding a career after leaving a thirty-year professional life to write full time — a transition that followed both her father's death and her divorce.

The emotional weight of all of this, per Kirkus Reviews, surfaces as "the darkest, saddest, angriest parts of [her]self that [she] could never deal with or had the time to explore." A turning point comes when her friend Leah connects her with Dr. Z, a practitioner of Rapid Transformational Therapy — described in the memoir as "a combination of hypnosis, talk therapy, and coaching" — who diagnoses Lithgow with PTSD rooted in a chaotic family upbringing.

Her RTT work with Dr. Z becomes a significant thread in the memoir's arc toward self-understanding.

Where the Writing Shines

Kirkus Reviews singles out Lithgow's humor as one of the memoir's genuine strengths, pointing specifically to her invention of "dating math" — an algorithm she mentally applies to every profile to pre-correct for the gap between stated and actual age and height. The review quotes her directly: "Even after I applied the dating math algorithm in my head, which aged him five years and decreased his height by four inches, he was still someone I'd date."

That kind of wry, self-aware comedy runs alongside passages of real emotional weight. Kirkus notes that the descriptions of verbal abuse from both her in-laws and her own family are "hair-raising," and that this darkness makes her eventual reckoning with her past feel hard-won rather than tidy.

The publisher's synopsis describes the overall register as a "unique mix of humor, self-deprecation, and gritty vulnerability." An additional detail from the Kirkus review adds texture: according to the memoir's own acknowledgments, the book began life as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry" before Lithgow turned to prose — a genesis that may explain the emotional intensity of the writing.

Genuine Limitations

Readers looking for a straightforward, breezy dating comedy may find the memoir's emotional range more demanding than the title alone suggests. The book is simultaneously a chronicle of bad dates, a divorce narrative, a grief memoir, a single-motherhood account, and a PTSD recovery story.

That breadth is also part of the book's ambition, but readers who come for laughs should know that the darkness is real and that Lithgow does not soften it. Additionally, because Joe remains a recurring presence — re-entering and exiting Lithgow's life throughout the year — readers who prefer clean narrative trajectories may find that strand unresolved in the way life itself tends to be unresolved.

Who This Book Is For

My Year of Really Bad Dates is designed for readers who have navigated midlife upheaval — divorce, re-entry into dating, grief, or the particular disorientation of reinventing oneself after 40 — and who want to see those experiences rendered with honesty and wit rather than reassuring gloss. The publisher positions it squarely as a story of "starting over in midlife," with the bad dates anchoring each chapter as both comic relief and emotional marker.

Kirkus Reviews gave the book their "Get It" endorsement and called it "funny, honest, and heart-wrenching" — a three-part description that reflects the memoir's actual tonal range rather than a single note. For readers who have ever sat across from a bad date thinking there has to be more to life than this, Lithgow's answer — messy, funny, and ultimately hopeful — is likely to resonate.

Sources & Further Reading

The key facts and claims in this review are grounded in the retrieved, verified sources listed below.

Cited in this review
1
My Year of Really Bad Dates: A Memoir by Rachel Lithgow, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®
barnesandnoble.com
Further reading
2
MY YEAR OF REALLY BAD DATES | Kirkus Reviews
kirkusreviews.com
3
My Year of Really Bad Dates: A Memoir by Rachel Lithgow, EXCERPT - Women Writers, Women's Books : Women Writers, Women's Books
booksbywomen.org
4
My Year of Really Bad Dates - Rachel J. Lithgow
racheljlithgow.com
5
My Year of Really Bad Dates | Rachel Lithgow | 9798896360100 | NetGalley
netgalley.com
6
Book Review: My Year of Really Bad Dates: A Memoir by Rachel Lithgow – Mandy's Book Nook
mandysbooknook.com
7
Reviews - My Year of Really Bad Dates: A Memoir | The StoryGraph
app.thestorygraph.com
8
My Year of Really Bad Dates by Rachel J. Lithgow | Book Review • Ana's Attic Book Blog
anasattic.com
9
My Year of Really Bad Dates: A Memoir by Rachel Lithgow | BookLife
booklife.com
10
My Year of Really Bad Dates | Book by Rachel Lithgow | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster
simonandschuster.com

Age & Reading Level

Recommended age

Adult

Browse all adult books

4 content notes · who it suits

Content to know about

verbal abuse (family and in-laws)

PTSD and trauma recovery

grief and parental death

divorce and emotional fallout

Best for: Adults — the memoir addresses divorce, PTSD, family trauma, and the specific emotional landscape of midlife reinvention; content and context are written for and about adult experience.

Skip if you're looking for a light, breezy dating comedy with minimal emotional weight.

From our readers

Reader reviews

Be one of the first readers to answer.

Read it? Was it right for you?

Books like My Year of Really Bad Dates

Curated picks for readers who enjoyed My Year of Really Bad Dates, with our reasoning for each match.

If you liked My Year of Really Bad Dates

In our catalogue

The Tell: A Memoir

Linda I. Meyers

Both memoirs excavate how family trauma quietly deforms adult relationships — and how late-life self-reckoning can finally name the damage.

Meyers writes about decades of emotional suppression, a fractured marriage, and the slow work of understanding how a difficult upbringing shaped her choices as an adult. The parallel to Lithgow's PTSD diagnosis and 22-year divorce aftermath is close enough that readers will feel they're in the same emotional territory. Best for readers who connected most with the 'digging into the past' sections rather than the dating comedy.

In our catalogue

Strangers Again: A Memoir of Marriage, Betrayal, and Becoming Whole

Sam Joe

A marriage that collapsed under betrayal and a long rebuild of self — shares the post-divorce reinvention arc with hard-won optimism at the end.

In our catalogue

The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

Lara Love Hardin

Trauma, shame, and a riotously honest voice — Hardin writes about self-destruction and recovery with the same dark humor and emotional courage.

In our catalogue

Out of the Corner: A Memoir

Jennifer Grey

A woman reassembles identity after years defined by other people's expectations — candid about romantic failures, body image, and finding a self that fits.

In our catalogue

Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story

Jewel

Childhood trauma, survival instinct, and an unexpected public life — Jewel writes about damage and resilience without softening either one.

In our catalogue

The Glass Castle: A Memoir

Jeannette Walls

Landmark memoir of surviving a chaotic, damaging family — shares the unsentimental honesty and dark-funny tone without letting parents off the hook.

Not your thing?

In our catalogue

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir

Matthew Perry

If the grief and PTSD sections felt too heavy, Perry's memoir delivers the same wry self-honesty about bad choices and relationships but keeps the pace faster and lighter.