Listen: Separation Stories – Love, loss and alcohol addiction

Sabina Read
Today on The Separation Guide podcast, I’m joined by award-winning journalist, columnist, editor and author Kate Halfpenny. Kate’s new memoir Boogie Wonderland is raw, unflinching and profoundly human. It’s a story that holds nothing back, exploring divorce, remarriage, grief, empty nesting, midlife reinvention, career pivots, parenting, family, identity, sea changes, addiction and love, with equal parts candor, compassion and hope. When Melbourne’s COVID lockdowns hit, Kate and her husband Chris made the leap to a seaside life in search of simplicity and renewal. But what was meant to be a fresh chapter quickly revealed unforeseen challenges as addiction surfaced and reshaped their dreams of a second marriage and a new start. In this conversation, Kate brings her trademark courage and clarity. She speaks openly about the messiness of life, the ache of loss, the fear of uncertainty, how to navigate addiction, the resilience of love and the hard-won joy that comes from telling the truth. Her ability to give language to pain and possibility is extraordinary. Boogie Wonderland is most definitely a page-turner, but this chat isn’t just about marriage, divorce or addiction. It’s about what it means to be human at life’s crossroads, to stay open when it would be easier to shut down and to find connection in the very places we fear we’re most alone.

Here’s my conversation with Kate Halfpenny.

Sabina Read
Kate, in your new memoir Boogie Wonderland. You said that as well as living in a light-filled small house on the coast, having savings, seeing your parents more and being in nature, you wanted to help people going through divorce. What sits behind this dream and why do you think it matters?

Kate Halfpenny
It just sprang from my own divorce, which I found so much more painful than I had ever imagined it would be. You know, we all grow up hearing about divorce and certainly in my career I had written so many stories about people that I didn’t know. You know, I’d written about their most private thing, their divorce, and it never really landed with me how hard it was. But when I went through it myself, I realised that what Drew Barrymore had said about it, which is that it is “like being dragged nude down a giant cheese grater non-stop”. That’s exactly right. How you lose not just your present but also the future that you’d planned and you know you blow up the the basis that you’ve built a family and financial security all of that just disappears so for me I was very much at sea when it happened I was blindsided by it I didn’t see it coming it was something that I had never anticipated happening to me, so I had no clue about where to turn. You know, I didn’t know whether I should see a lawyer immediately or whether I should just sit with it. I yearned to have some sort of proper resource that would guide me through the various stages that were involved, not just the legalities of it, but also the emotional side of it. And I don’t think I really found what I wanted, I was kind of patching it together as I went along and I was also surrounded by, you know, all my plethora of happily married friends. So I was sort of the one odd man out who was actually getting a divorce in real life. So, the impact of that, for me, was enormous. And so I really did make a pledge to myself that if there was an opportunity ever where I could offer any assistance, whatever that looked like, to anyone else going through the same situation, I would love to do that.

Sabina Read
Well, you’re in the right place here on the Separation Guide podcast because I know there’ll be many listeners who, I guess, we’ve also got listeners who are contemplating divorce, not just those that have made a decision and all of the pieces, as you say, emotional, physical, financial, psychological, geographical, relational that are upended in even contemplating divorce as an option, as well as going through it as an experience and a choice or perhaps not a choice. So thank you for sharing, for sharing that. You married Jay, your first husband when you were 24?

Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, yep.

Sabina Read
And after you met him at 17.

Kate Halfpenny
Yes.

Sabina Read
Then you have, by the time you’re 24, you’ve got three kids under five. You’ve got a full-blown job as a journalist, and in 2013 it ended. As you say, you write about Drew Barrymore’s description of being nude and dragged up and down, a cheese grater is what divorce feels like. But then you say that you navigated divorce with the same regard and respect for each other that brought you together in the first place. How do you think you managed to maintain that love and respect after all the hurt and grief and shock?

Kate Halfpenny
With great difficulty. You know, like it’s one of the biggest balancing acts I think that you can pull off because you are, I think my judgement was clouded a lot of the time. You know, you are awash with grief and uncertainty and despair and, you know, I really remember lying on the carpet sobbing to Jay and saying, who am I going to go on holiday with and I sort of think how shallow that was. But also, it was really prescient and really important because it’s it’s that idea of who is my person now? You know, I’m in my 40s, my kids are growing up, soon they’ll be gone what does my life look like. It’s a blind-sighting thing. And for me, I was determined that the children would only see us with a good relationship. Not that I wanted to sugarcoat it for them. They clearly knew that their parents were breaking up and that their whole world had imploded. So I didn’t want to pretend that everything was fine. It was clear that it wasn’t. But I also had as a priority that, you know, Jay was going to be in my life forever. For the rest of my life, we were going to be standing next to each other at weddings and probably at funerals and at graduations. And I also still really loved him. Their parents had broken up. I wanted them to know that while the marriage was over, the relationship kept going that we were still a family. And there were times when it was really hard. You know, Jay was angry. He had certain opinions about what had happened and I did as well. And so we were both trying to protect ourselves. But my mission, I think, was to always stand in his shoes and say, what does he actually need in this, which was hard to do sometimes. But we didn’t actually end up seeing a lawyer. I saw one briefly and she was like, we are going to take this guy to the cleaners. We’re going to hang him out to dry. We’re doing this and this and this. And now I need a giant retainer, and can you pay it by three o’clock? And I was like, what’s going on here? I don’t want to take him to the cleaners. You know, I don’t want that to be our story. I don’t want the legacy of the emotional love that we’ve had and the beautiful memories that we’ve created and this family that we’ve built. I don’t want that to be trashed because you want that CD or you want that dinner set. Like that just seemed crazy that we would worry about divvying up actual bought stuff, even finances. So we pretty much just sat down one day at our kitchen bench and had a glass of wine and he said what do you want and I said what do you want and he said 50 /50 how does it sound? Sounds fine to me and you know he said, look you’ll be having the kids more than I do I’ll chuck in some extra money, and it was pretty much decided in in the space of a glass of wine and we stuck to that. You know he was great when he moved out he said you can keep all the furniture, you can do this and that, I don’t want you to have to buy anything else. I don’t want the kids to feel that their home is not their home anymore, which was really fantastic. So in that way, I think, you know, from what I hear about divorce stories, we were really lucky. But my advice to anyone would be, you know, don’t get caught up in the material stuff. Like, yes, I understand that you need to come out of it with reasonable money to go forward. But don’t fight over your aunt’s vase or about the dog or whatever it is. It’s just not worth it. Or it certainly wasn’t to me. Like, I really think that you need to hold fast to that love that brought you together so that you can move into the future with each other because it’s necessary.

Sabina Read
And you just said, Kate, we were really lucky, or I was really lucky, but how much did luck play in the story you just shared then?

Kate Halfpenny
Isn’t that a great question? Probably you’re right, I actually don’t really believe in luck so much. No, it’s not that we were strategic, we were careful with our emotions, and we were determined, I think, that we were going to have as good a divorce as we could to honour the love that we had. And I love that we still had that connection and we were able to honour what brought us together in the first place. Yes, the love had changed. I’m not saying that I was still in love with him, but I very much love what we’ve built together. And I do, my heart hurts when I hear people saying I don’t talk to my ex at all, or you know, they’re not in my life, or we’ve only communicated by email for seven years about how to, you know, give the children over to each other. I just think that doesn’t serve anyone any good. You know, again, I really needed my kids to know that we still had a relationship. But more personally, I still wanted to know that I did. I didn’t want to think that I was ever excommunicated or that he was simply because our romantic love had stopped. I really wanted to make sure that what we had could carry forward in a different shape. I mean, I’m an interesting person to talk about with this because I still love everyone I’ve ever been. But you know, with I make it a point of doing that. You know, when I broke up with my very first serious boyfriend and he’d written me all these beautiful letters that I had tied up with a glittery shoe lace, which is really funny and I remember saying to Mum when I married Jay, “Do I need to chuck out all of that stuff that I’ve got from my old boyfriend?” And she said, “Oh my God, no, he’s a part of you. He’s a part of who you are today.” The person that you were when you were together has changed. He helped create who you are, you must always keep him in your heart and in your home and I wanted to do the same with Jay.

Sabina Read
So it’s really intentional as opposed to luck in the story that you’ve just shared, and the choices that you made, but you both had to make them. And often in divorce, we say I’m going to do things differently until the rubber hits the road, and then we follow suit with the way many people separate. And that’s with anger and animosity and resentment. But somehow you were both, not just you, but both you and Jay were able to stay on the path.

Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, and I’m super proud of us for doing that. It’s a really big achievement. I think it’s like, if you choose to breastfeed, you know, like it’s a lot harder than it looks. You think you’re just gonna pick up that baby and click it on like a bit of Lego, and it feeds, and then you put it back down and no problem. And it’s actually so hard to do. So if you stick with it and you manage to do it, you know, that I count that as one of my big achievements in life, breastfeeding three kids for five years. You know, that’s something that I’m really proud of, and I am proud with our divorce because it is easy to get mired in there. He said this, she said that my heart is hurting, therefore I’m going to lash out. I get it, like it’s excruciatingly painful. I’m absolutely in no way saying that this divorce was, you know, all wine and roses, and it was terrific and we were holding hands, skipping around, and still loving each other. It wasn’t like that. There were some really terrible moments, and I would not wish it on anyone. It’s so much harder than you think it’s going to be. I do sometimes wonder if we tried hard enough to stick with it. I think we did. I hope that we did. I think that we had the right outcome. But, you know, I spent a lot of time I would get the kids off to school and act as if nothing had happened. Then I would fill up the bath and get in there – often with my laptop, which is really funny like propped on a tray – and I do my work in there. And when the bath went cold, I knew that I’d survived another hour, you know, like even now that devastates me. And I’d fill it back up again and it would get cold and I’d think tick I’ve ticked off another hour and this sort of ghastly thing that has befallen me. It was funny the way that happened and then you know the kids were coming home from school so I’d get out of the bath and put on my cheery mum face again and as if nothing was wrong and I was fine and it’s it’s interesting thinking about that because certainly more than one of my children said to me: it’s as if you never loved dad. You know, it’s like this hasn’t impacted you. Because I didn’t miss a day of work, and I certainly didn’t drop the ball, but I think that was my way of keeping everything together – and I thought I was doing the right thing by doing that.

Sabina Read
Well, you kept your grief to yourself and your wrinkly body in the bathtub and then presented your happy face when they came home from school.

Kate Halfpenny
Yes, and I would probably be more honest about that, I think that I wish that I’d said to them I just need to lie down for a week. You are actually going to maybe have to look after me for a while because I can’t deal with it. But that would be the only thing that I would change about it. The rest of it I think we did really well and it’s a credit to us. You know, when I met my next husband and the day that we moved into our place together with the children, the first person to arrive at the new house on that day was Jay to help move us all in, you know, like it was, that’s pretty amazing.

Sabina Read
Well, it is something to be proud of, and I think it’s inspirational. It gives some kind of roadmap to the way that things can be done and different to the way so many people assume divorce needs to go. You just mentioned Chris there. What is it like for Chris to be in a relationship? Let’s go back to, I’m thinking when you were first together. And you’re talking about Jay this and Jay that, not as the ex-husband that you’re angry and resentful of. I understand you still even share a bank account with Jay now. Is that right?

Kate Halfpenny
Still now, and perhaps now as the kids are adults. Now as the kids are adults. We actually closed that down in the last four weeks. But it lasted for, it had its 30-year anniversary.

Sabina Read
How – How did you celebrate?

Kate Halfpenny
Literally had a 30-year anniversary and then we decided, you know, like we didn’t need that anymore. You know, for a long time, that was just a little link that we had to each other. Initially it started as something that we used to transfer money between each other if we needed it for the kids. And then I don’t know, we just sort of held on to it. But yes, that lasted 30 years. But yeah, Chris knew about all of that. And this is going to, this is, now I’m going to sound like I am. I don’t even know how I’m going to come across when I say this. I’m just going to say it: that I started going out with Chris six weeks after Jay left. So it was an indecently short amount of time.

Sabina Read
Who says?

Kate Halfpenny
Well, that’s exactly right. Well, a lot of people said it. A lot of people said it, and we sort of faced a lot of clap back about that, which I hated at the time, because from the start with Chris I knew that it was really serious. I knew that it was going to be a very important love in my life. So, I hated the idea that people would dismiss that as it’s just a rebound, it’s whatever, but you know what you you can’t time things. People find you when they find you and funnily enough I’d known Chris even longer than I knew Jay. Met Jay on the beach in Surfer’s Paradise when I was 17, and had known Chris for a couple of years before that. He was a friend of my brother’s, and so I used to see a fair bit of him and he had this giantcblonde mullet. You might remember from back in the early ’80s.

Sabina Read
I don’t remember his, but I remember the blonde mullet.

Kate Halfpenny
Well, you remember the blonde mullet. Yeah, not his specifically, but certainly that generic blonde mullet that they all had and he’s got an enormous head. So when he would come around, it felt like his head was blocking out all the light when I was trying to study in my bedroom. And it wasn’t love at first sight, but it’s interesting that I have known both of those men since we were teenagers.

Sabina Read
And there is something about what you said that you still connected, or feel fond feelings for all of your exes. And I think, as you said, exes bear witness to who we are and the stages of life that we’ve lived through, and the growth, and the grief, and the learning, and the jobs, and the studies, and the friends, and the moves. So they are important in the fabric of who we are.

Kate Halfpenny
See, I’m wrapped that you say that, because you are the expert on this. I’m really wrapped that you’re not saying to me, it’s time to give it up, girl. Living in the past, and it’s not that, it’s not as if I’m sort of, you know, I’ve got my mixed tape on that my first boyfriend made me and I’m sitting there thinking about him and singing don’t change or whatever. I’m not doing that but I really do love the idea of still loving all of them if I gave them my heart once and my body and my dreams and all of it, you know, we were so close. I don’t want to ever think that they’re just out there in the world and they’re not important anymore. Like I’m confident they never think about me. I would have no expectation about that, but from my point of view, if I’m in love with you then I’m going to love you forever.

Sabina Read
Yeah and let’s not be surprised if they are thinking about you, not with your mixed tape that you made for them but in their own way. So you’ve introduced us to Chris in this chat. As you say, six weeks after you separated with Jay, you were 44? He’s 46. Are you 46? Chris was 44? Okay.

Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, he’s a baby.

Sabina Read
Okay. And on your first date, you’re singing Air Supply – and I just have to share, I’m going to the Air Supply 50th Anniversary Concert in 48hours to bang out ballads. It’ll be my third time seeing them. So when I read that in Boogie Wonderland, I was like, “Oh, I love reading your story.” And on a first date he’s singing Air Supply.

Kate Halfpenny
Like, he had me at Hello, but it wasn’t Hello. It was Two less lonely people in the world.

Sabina Read
Exactly right.

Kate Halfpenny
And I laugh when I think about it now, because I had invited him around for this date, which then I suddenly thought, “I don’t want this to be a date.” He had said to me, “I don’t know what’s happening with you and Jay, but if you ever need someone to talk to, I am a grouse listener and an amateur movie critic. Like I remember that line as if it was literally yesterday, like it was funny. And I thought, okay, maybe he’s got a point because you want to know personally, but people listening may know that when you break up or you divorce, friends take sides. You absolutely lose friends. People who have, people are invested in your brand and they were certainly invested in their brand, Kate and Jay. So a lot of people are in panic stations. Where does this leave us? Are we now Team Kate, or are we Team Jay? Is it infectious? Is our own relationship now going to be damaged? It was a funny time. I really didn’t know who to trust and who to talk to. When this kind of guy, who used to have the big blocky head, said he’s a grouse listener, it was like maybe that’s quite a cool idea. I can just bounce things off someone. I invited him around for this Saturday dinner and started cooking the pasta about seven hours before we actually ate it, which he still teases me about. Yes, I was drinking a lot that night. I just felt something was happening, though, like there was that bubble of, is this really real? There were little things zinging around and yes, it certainly ended in me pulling the best of air supply, the Reader’s Digest version in vinyl off my self and putting it on the record player and we were sort of belting out, you know, I’m all out of love to each other and he was doing the wab wab bars and it’s just like, this guy’s amazing. It’s really funny. So about half an hour after that, I said to him, I think we should go upstairs and he’s like, what? Do you want me to get a taxi home? I was like, nah, this is happening, we’re going upstairs. So I did tell him that I loved him on that first date, he looked at me like, “Should I now be leaving really quickly as you’re bonnie boiler? What’s happening here?” But he stayed and he told me a week later that he also loved me. But he said he felt it on the night but thought it was way, way too weird to say it on the first date.

Sabina Read
Well, what did you love about him? What made you say that? Yeah. Apart from air supply, which makes us all say that.

Kate Halfpenny
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. The week before the overcooked pasta date, we had been writing to each other on Facebook Messenger, which sounds so funny now. And his writing was perfect. Like, as a writer, I rarely see good writing and that’s even from professional journalists. Like, my job has been an editor. People who are allegedly writers send their stuff to me, and I have to make a hundred fixes because not many people can write. This man was writing perfect, perfect prose, not just punctuation-wise, but he just seemed so emotionally intelligent and funny. He seemed to get stuff, black sense of humour, pink heart, like it was all there for me. So even that week prior, when I was in the bath reading his messages on my iPad, it was just like this man is unreal and I think I’m in love with him. And that, even to me, sounds wacky. I’m not a woo-woo person, but I can’t explain it.

Sabina Read
But it kind of makes sense then that you felt you could express it on the, I’m going to say, overcooked past night if you were cooking for seven, six, seven hours. Slightly overcooked. And then inviting him upstairs. You kind of knew before he opened the door.

Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, I think that I did and funnily enough though I’d sort of panicked and I’d invited about eight friends around at the last minute and said there is this guy coming around, and they were all like, but what: Jay just moved out six weeks ago, what are you doing? I said I don’t know what I’m doing. I do not know, so can you please come and run interference? And so when he actually rolled up, there were sort of eight randoms sitting in the backyard. I think he’d expected a one-on-one and I was again, having just been recently separated, the one thing I could control was food and stuff. So I wasn’t eating very much. I’d lost heaps of weight, so I was a bit of a flippity jibbit. Nothing really was anchoring me to the earth. I was feeling very weird, so, you know, there’s this, and there I am, bringing him into this group of strangers who were like, “What is this man even doing here? We don’t approve of this, but it was funny when one of them, my gorgeous friend, Josie, was leaving. She said to me, “You need to look out here. There is something happening between you two.” Which was interesting that it was apparent even to an outsider who had not been privy to his special writing that I’d been seeing during that time.

Sabina Read
So then you have to send the eight people home?

Kate Halfpenny
Yeah. After about an hour, I packed them home and said, “I’ve got this now.” And they were all sort of had their worrying looks on their faces and like, really are you sure, do you want us to stay. I’m like, no I’ve got it from here. I’ve got it from here. So, I think that I was trying to make out that it wasn’t a date. I think I was trying to say to myself this is not a date. It’s been six weeks: what sort of person are you? But I knew that it was a date, I really loved him.

Sabina Read
And did he do any critiquing of any movies?

Kate Halfpenny
Yes, he bought along A Foul Play, the really old Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase movie, which I super love, which was such a random choice. Like when he said, “This is what we’re watching,” he won me over there because it was such a quirky and fun choice and his back up was The Guard, the Irish movie, again, which is very comedic and super funny. And so, yeah, he nailed it there. So he didn’t spit out the pasta, which was really great. And he was dancing to Air Supply. I was like, what else could be wrong with this man? Yeah, it sounds near perfect.

Sabina Read
And within a year, you’re married.

Kate Halfpenny
I think certainly within a year, we were engaged. We were engaged about seven hours after my divorce came through. Yeah, we were married really quickly.

Sabina Read
Yes. Okay. Then you move into your very cool, very edgy inner-city Collingwood apartment or warehouse conversion. I don’t know what you call it, but you talk a lot about it. It’s quite meaningful, I think, in Boogie Wonderland, in your story, in your memoir about what it kind of represented and the role it played and how meaningful it was and then how difficult it was. And at that time, in COVID, I think this is, you describe a lot having a revolving door of friends and family and children who are coming and going. So I was really struck with how much your relationship and you’ve just affirmed it by your first date, having eight punters in the backyard as well on your first date with you, that some part of your relationship was very much void and connected by other people.

Sabina Read
There was this tribe, there were people wrapping their arms around you, sharing the space, partying. They were kind of part of this connection between the two of you. And I wonder how you view that role of others as either supporting and helping or hindering the relationship?

Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, you are exactly right there, Sabina, that’s spot on. You know, like we never lived together, just the two of us. When we bought Collingwood, that was the first time that we’d actually lived together and suddenly he’s got a wife and he’s got two teenage children. The other one was at uni in Sydney and he’s folded into this family. My brother lived with us for a while. Chris’s cousin’s estranged husband lived with us for a while. We had children’s friends moving in and out. So yeah, it really was a revolving door community and we were living in a block of only six apartments so we were in love with every person who lived there. It really was kind of a secret life of our stuff where we lived very much, you know, we were very much involved in each other’s lives. Looking after plants and children and dogs and putting up bins and, you know, running favours and cooking for each other and so that was really important to you. Exactly right, there was always this backdrop and because we were in Collingwood we would get calls at ten’o’clock on a Friday night from people saying, “We are around the corner. There’s 12 of us. Do you mind if we just drop in for a drink?” We’d go, “Yes.” You know, so we’d run around quickly, lighting candles and getting out some rummaging out some cheese and what, you know, packet of chips, whatever we had going and welcoming all these people into our lives. And I really loved that part of it. And I think it is important, but I didn’t realise how important it was until we made the next move, which was down to Ocean Grove, and that was the first time that we had lived together just the two of us. You know, that was a whole different experience.

Sabina Read
Well, let’s talk about that. So, you finally make the decision to move to Ocean Grove. And this is against the backdrop of your childhood move when you moved from mainland Australia to eastern coast of Tassie with your family who were running a motel. So I was also aware that in your story it was a meaningful time, a memorable time for you to live to be free by the sea. There was something about that Tassie experience. Tell me, what was it like in Tassie before we get to Ocean Grove?

Kate Halfpenny
Tassie was unreal. I moved there when I was eight or nine and just loved it. Mum and Dad had bought this iconic Tasmanian motel in a fishing village called Bishino. I think the population then was below 200, but it was just for us. My brother and I, my sisters, went off to boarding school in Lonnie. So we were just on our Honda 50s every day, just burning around together and having adventures and having the best time of all time, like we would deliver the continental breakfast through the little hutches and we’d run next door literally to the school, come back at lunchtime, mum would cook us some fresh Traveller and chips, and off we’d go back to school and then back to our mini-bike adventures. So for me it was a time of enormous freedom and fun, and just to not be living in landlocked Melbourne anymore, you know, we’d moved from Glen Waverley to this place of stunning physical beauty. And we didn’t really get that the mum and dad’s main punters were the fishermen who came in every night off their boats from four to six and drank themselves silly and then rolled back off and you know we didn’t see that part of it and we certainly didn’t see the hard-working part of it that mum and dad were literally working 24 hours a day. For us, it was just like woohoo had the best time and so that was something that I always wanted to get back to in some shape or form, and when my kids were growing up, we used to have a caravan at Barwon Heads for three months of the year. That’s where the kids learnt to surf, and that for me represented enormous freedom again because you’ve got just a caravan. The only house work is that you sweep it out once a day. There’s not really any cooking because you’re barbecuing some snags, and that’s about i,t and the kids can run to the IGA and get whatever else they need. So again, it was this life by the seaside that represented to me liberty from domesticity and from everything else. And so I wanted to recreate that.

Sabina Read
Yeah, and I didn’t want to over-join dots that aren’t there to be joined, but I thought that was very loud in your childhood story. And a very formative experience for you in Tassie. And I wondered how much, particularly against the backdrop of COVID, when there was zero freedom, zero frivolity, and zero fun, how much you were yearning for that. And so then you make the decision to move to Ocean Grove. How much of it would you call yourself the initiator, and Chris the follower, or was it an equal decision? How did you arrive at making the call to make the move, which meant selling and buying, and moving and turning your lives upside down?

Kate Halfpenny
Oh, I think I was very much the tyrant who drove it. You know, we talked about it as something that we might possibly do in five to 10 years, further down the track, you know, once the kids didn’t need us anymore and maybe we were semi-retired, then whatever that looked like, we did talk about it, but then it sort of was accelerated, yeah, by COVID and by a really bad job decision that I took and by the fact that our Rockstar apartment leaked for five years, you know, as it seems almost every new build does these days. Yeah, so I literally was the one who brought it forward. I woke up one morning and just looked at him in bed and said, “I need to get out of here. We need to move.” And he was amazing. He just looked at me and said, “Great, let’s go house shopping.” And he didn’t hesitate. I think that he could see the stress that I had been under throughout COVID, as we all were. You know, this is not a story that is special to me. He was amazing.

Sabina Read
And you even say in the book that you are having the time of your lives, you’ve bought a blow-up Clark rubber pool, you’re having cocktails under the orchard trees and there’s gardens on three sides, very picturesque what you’re describing in the home and your elderly dog Maggie’s living her happiest best life on a single level floor home. But you also talk about alcohol playing quite a role in the relationship and even from the first date with the eight punters in the garden and you know, pouring a wine and over-cooking pasta, from the day you got together to your years in Collingwood and then your time in Ocean Grove, it sounds like there was a lot of fun and play and alcohol and lightness and levity between you?

Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And I mean, I’ve always enjoyed drinking. It’s been a part of my life since I was a cadet journal at 18. You know, that was sort of the language which we all used to communicate and that was carried on through my first marriage. Jay and I used to love a bottle of wine every night when the kids were asleep. And certainly Chris and I did. Booze was, it was the, you know, I’m happy to say it was the third wheel in our marriage. We loved drinking together. You know, during COVID, we would kick off our Sundays with 1.30 cocktailsand by 2.30 we would be in our undies dancing to Foo Fighters and thinking we were unreal and you know stirring up more cocktails so you know it was it was what we did our inner city life was very much let’s just walk up to the local bar for a quick drink and let’s do whatever that was the reality of our life and I loved it. I had a really great time with him and we were very playful and I really did enjoy it – and same at Ocean Grove. Yes, we would have cocktail hour at 5.30/6 in the Clark Rubber pool. It was great. I felt like I was living in a resort. It was very, we had a lot of fun. Yeah.

Sabina Read
Then fast forward to the day at the beach, which is really a pivotal point in your memoir, when your dad’s floundering near drowning in what sounded like relatively shallow waters, but he was struggling as an older person. And Chris rushes out to rescue him and falls over himself, then what happens?

Kate Halfpenny
And I was about 30 metres away with my boogie board and I was just sort of looking at them boys and thinking what’s going on here, like why can’t Dad stand up and why can’t Chris get him up. So I sort of ditched the boogie board, ran over and you know, wrestled Dad up to his feet. Sort of looking at Chris and thinking why are you smiling as if you are drunk. And then I realised because he was drunk. And this was probably four ‘o ‘clock in the afternoon. Yeah, he was drunk enough that he couldn’t, he literally couldn’t lift my dad up and I had to. I’m not a big person and you know for me to be able to do that and my husband not to I knew something was wrong and yeah he was drunk. And it was a strange day, you know like dried dad off, got him home and funnily enough gave him a beer and we had a chat and then when he left I said to Chris, you know like actually just went to town on him, like what is happening why were you drunk ,I know that you were drunk and yeah it it came out slowly and had to be dragged out of him that he’d actually been drinking secretly for a lot of the summer up to half a bottle of vodka a day and then you know that I didn’t know about. And then maybe Bottle of Rose while we were having dinner. And that it just was, it blindsided me. It was that same feeling of getting divorced. Like, this is not something that I thought was going to happen. And also, there was that question of I am a trained observer of people. This has been my job for four decades. Why did I not know this? I mean there had been occasions over the summer where I’d smelt something when we were kissing or just talking and you know say have you been drinking and it was kind of half joking because why would he be drinking in the middle of the day and he’d go no what are you talking about I just had a coke a minute ago or whatever but yeah it transpired that he had had been drinking in secret for a while and it culminated in this day with dad and we had this was such an unidifying situation where it sort of all spilled out onto the front lawn and we were having this wrestle and you know, I hate even thinking about it, but I was sort of throwing punches at my husband. So hard actually that I had to ice my hand with the frozen peas afterwards but I didn’t, I couldn’t stop myself I was so mad at what he’d done to my dad and to me when I realised he’d been driving us around to the beach every day for boogie boarding, you know, after he’d been drinking. It was like, what if he’d run over a kid in a car park, or what if he’d killed us, or, you know, what if he drowned? There are all of these what ifs. I mean, as tend to happen when, you know, you catastrophize a bit in that kind of situation, but mostly it was just like, what does this mean? What does this look like now, and what do I want out of it? And so I asked him to leave so that I could have some think time. And he did, he packed a bag and marched off into the darkness and it was just incredible like sitting there in what I thought was my dream home thinking, what happens now? What does this mean, and is this next marriage now in danger?

Sabina Read
Did you have any history or experience of addiction in any other parts of your life?

Kate Halfpenny
Absolutely none. None. No, and it took me a really long time, Sabina, to work out or to cobble together what I now know about it purely through lived experience and again just as, you know, I would not advise divorce to anyone unless you are sort of physically or emotionally in danger. I understand there are times, that it’s absolutely necessary. Actually, I probably have rephrased that comes in. Why I’d say that divorce is harder than you think it’s going to be, so is being married to an addict. It was really hard.

Sabina Read
What was the hardest part?

Kate Halfpenny
The isolation. At that point, I didn’t know enough about alcoholism to understand that it was a disease rather than purely just an addiction. You know, I thought that he was choosing to do this. I thought that somehow I was to blame for it. I wasn’t enough. This new life that I had insisted that we move to wasn’t enough. You know, like I’d pulled the rug out from under his feet. He loved it in the city. And I made him move away from everything that we had built up there. You know, I felt very guilty and very confused about it. And it did take a really long time for it to be pointed out to me and eventually for it to sink in, that actually his alcoholism and addiction had nothing to do with me. And that’s hard to know as well, where you think that you’re such an integral part of someone’s life. Surely they want to get better for you or make better choices for you, but when someone is that much in the grip of an addiction, they can’t help it. It’s not a choice. He wasn’t doing it to hurt me.

Sabina Read
And as the focus of the separation guide is very much around separation and divorce and marriage and relationships. You’re talking with such clarity now in hindsight about some of the things that were missing for him and that alcohol or he hoped alcohol would numb or blur as you say. But at the time, did he talk or did you talk together around some of those themes?

Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, we definitely did. We definitely did discuss that. We’ve always been really good at communicating with each other from the start. We have really good open communication, but I mean, it is also very hard to talk to someone when they’re drunk most of the time. A) they don’t remember what they say to you, B) they’re not really putting together coherent
thoughts, and so that was really difficult. What happened to me was that I became super isolated. And I think that it really did push our marriage to the brink, because he was isolated in his own world of drinking and how much he enjoyed that. He also hated it at the same time, hated the chaos that it brought and hated, you know, the physical side of it. But in a marriage or relationship, if one person is an addict, it is supremely isolating for the other person because I didn’t know how to tell people what was going on. At that stage it still did feel to me as if it was a shameful secret and as if it was something that we needed to sort out by ourselves. I did feel shame I think at being a middle-aged middle-class woman married to a man who was a senior manager and at household name Australian business and saying the words “my husband is an alcoholic” and I hate it when I say that, but I think it’s important to say it, because I think that’s a reality for a lot of people. You know, I think it’s the figures now are that it’s one-third of Australians have a problematic relationship with alcohol, but only I think one in eight of us are willing to fess up to any difficulties with it because studies show that we are more likely to talk about our sex lives or our financial situation than we are about our relationship with drinking. For some reason, there is still that stigma associated with it. It’s seen as shameful, it’s seen as you should be able to control yourself. We just don’t really talk about it enough. And alcohol is what we use to celebrate, to commiserate, to wake us up, to put us to sleep. You know, it’s an ever-present thing in our lives for a lot of us. And yeah, I didn’t know who to turn to to say, hey, remember that gorgeous new man that I married, the one that I love so much, the one that I have such huge hopes for, for this second marriage. And I mean, second marriages are different to first marriages because you know that you’re not going to be building a family or you’re not going to be really building up a real estate sort of base or a financial thing. It’s a totally different ballgame. You have to just be enough for each other, the two of you. That has to be the case. And so suddenly if the two of you is joined by a third thing, which is alcoholism, and you’re isolated from your family structure and from your friends, you’ve left everything behind you in a new community, it was almost unbearable.

Sabina Read
What made it not unbearable?

Kate Halfpenny
Time, and Chris deciding to get better, but even that was a real process. You know, when I initially found out that he was drinking and I, you know, banished him for the three days, you know, huffing and puffing and thinking, “How dare he do this to me?” And that was very much my mindset at that time. I didn’t have the emotional intelligence or the understanding of alcoholism to say, “I hate what he’s doing to himself. I need to really support him through it.” You know, that took me a while to see that I was pretty selfish about it. It was all me, me, me. What does this mean to me rather than what does it mean to him? Because it seemed to me like he was having a great old time, you know, it just seemed to me he was making this decision to get drunk all the time. And I couldn’t see them. What was compelling that and that it is an actual disease. So when he came back, you know, I’d done some research and I’d spoken to one girlfriend who’s a psychologist and said, “What do I do here?” And she was actually really interesting and said, “Well, what do you want to do here? Do you want to cut ties with him? She said something like, “Is he the anchor who is dragging you down below the wave so you can’t breathe, or is he actually anchoring you to the earth? Is he what’s holding you together?” It was a really interesting question, you know, like, “Do I cut him free or not?” I was never going to do that, you know, like I always wanted to, once I came out of my own, you know, me, me, me, like I was really determined that I wanted him to get better, whether or not we were still together at the end of that was sort of by the by, it was more just like, I love this man so much, he’s just beautiful and I want him to get healthy. So when he came home I said, look, I cannot say to you that I insist that you got go to rehab. I’m not doing that. That’s not what our relationship is. You’re an autonomous person and I’ll never tell you anything that needs doing. But if you don’t go to rehab, we will not be together in three years’ time. We just won’t be. I can’t do this. To his credit, he said that he would go, which was fabulous. He did go very unwillingly. We had to wait for eight or so weeks until he could get a spot in rehab, which is another whole story. You know, in Australia it is so hard if you, particularly if you don’t have private health insurance, it can take up to a year to get a bed in a Resi rehab. So we were lucky that we had health insurance and off he went up to a Sydney residential clinic for three weeks and that was a very interesting time too because I was by myself with, by then I had an old dog and a puppy and I was trying to run a business and was not telling anybody where Chris had disappeared to people would say to me in the street, “Where’s Chris?” I’d say, “Oh, he’s in Sydney.” And they’d go “for work?” I’d go, “Uh-huh.” And, you know, I couldn’t, I feel so weird now that I wasn’t able to say this is what’s happening because I feel like people would have offered their help. Although again, I think I felt like as with the divorced people think it’s a bit contagious and they’re like whoa we love putting with you guys is this going to change we might take a step back but I mean it was his story as well I didn’t want to be broadcasting what was then his very personal story and while he was struggling to deal with it so but it was interesting sitting back you know it was the first time to have been in my entire life and at that stage I was mid 50s that I had been in a house by myself with no children, no husbands, no parents, no siblings, just two dogs. And it gave me an opportunity to think, do I really want to be married? Have I done the right thing? Did I rush into this? Was this a bad decision? What do I want the rest of my life to look like? Would I be better by myself? It was a really, really fascinating sort of three weeks of thinking about myself for the first time in a long time, you know, as a mother, you’re responsible for everyone and everything. And finally, it was my turn to think about what I wanted.

Sabina Read
And where did you land?

Kate Halfpenny
Oh, that I wanted him, you know, that I really wanted to be married to him, but certainly I was terrified of what he was gonna be like when he came back. Like, we had only known each other as drinking partners. And if you remove that from the marriage, how does it look? Are you suddenly bored? Do you still get on? Do you still like each other? And it sounds really bizarre thinking, you know, like is this even a reality? But I think it is for a lot of people, you know, like a lot of us bond over alcohol and, you know, there’s nothing better than when you’re sitting down with the person that you love and you have that first glass of wine and there’s that lovely glitter of potential and you start laughing with each other, like it’s a really nice thing to do. So to think that that was going to be removed and you know the question for me was would we be enough for each other especially that we were in this house just by ourselves with no kids, no family, no friends, no anything, it was a real test of our marriage and how strong the relationship and the foundation of it was.

Sabina Read
So how did you navigate, it’s really a new marriage. It’s your third marriage but it’s your second to the same person without alcohol third-wheeling. What does it look like now the relationship and also what’s your relationship with alcohol look like for you within the context of the relationship?

Kate Halfpenny
I love that you’ve said it’s a third marriage, like it actually, you’re actually right. You’re actually right like it’s it’s not the same marriage that we started with.

Sabina Read
How does it look now?

Kate Halfpenny
Well, the initial rehab was unsuccessful. He came back and it was clearly worse than when he had left.

Sabina Read
Statistically, that is not uncommon.

Kate Halfpenny
Yeah, he was like a broken man. So, before long he was drinking again and we were back to square one with it. But it was probably worse. You know, some things he said to me during that period like I could never forget, but I had to just keep thinking “this is not my husband”. And so it was a process. He did eventually, he went back to rehab in February last year so Feb 2024 and hasn’t had a drink since then, which has been amazing, so we’re 18 months now into our sober marriage and it’s fabulous. But it’s weird, I think that there would be times when we would both say it’s boring, but we would happily take that and take the peace of it over the chaos that we used to have. There’s also something quite lovely about it, like when we know that every conversation we have, we’re going to remember it. Every conversation we have, even if it is mundane, it’s actually honest and authentic. There’s not that artifice of booze behind it. You know, we’re just talking the two of us and if we don’t talk, if we sit in the car for two hours and don’t talk, I think that’s okay as well. You know, we have found that real place of peace and understanding, and I just admire him so much. He’s back at the gym five times a week, you know, which he stopped doing when he was drinking a lot, and that was the reason he wanted to go back to rehab the second time. He said, “I’m going to kill the marriage and I’m going to kill myself.” So he had enough self-awareness to see that both of those were in peril to which I am just so grateful to him. So it’s actually pretty lovely and as I say, if it’s boring, I will take that over crazy. We both wake up with a clear head every day. You know, I used to wake up every morning and the first thing I would hear would be the rattle of two Nurophan in Chris’s palm when he was doing that before he even said good morning to me, you know, because he would be poisoned from the night before and already looking forward to when he would poison himself again because that’s what he needed to feel better. I mean, he hates it if people think they can’t drink around him. It’s one of his big bug bears. As he says, I’m the alcoholic, you are not. So people are absolutely welcome to come to our house and drink. It’s just that he doesn’t drink any more and we kind of say to people that he’s allergic to alcohol, as if he’s allergic to shellfish, or you know whatever it is, which seems to make them understand it a little bit more because otherwise people still do that weird thing, just have one drink you know one beer won’t hurt you mate or whatever it’s kind of weird. We’re definitely not we’re not a dry house. He and I don’t drink together during the week, if it’s just us ther,e I’m happy not to do that. But if we have friends around on the weekend or whatever, I definitely have a drink, which I really enjoy. And he’s fine with that. You know, I don’t ever look at him and think, “Oh, I shouldn’t have one because he can’t have one.” He’s mature enough to say, “This is not your problem.” And it makes him feel worse if other people adjust their behaviour because of him.

Sabina Read
Thank you for sharing. It’s a very honest and raw exploration. Not just into the place of addiction in a marriage or in a relationship, but into the dynamic and the space between you and within you. It’s courageous, I think, to share and I know that it will be impactful for a lot of listeners. Sixty-nine per percent of issues that couples have are what we call perpetual issues. And those perpetual issues are non-resolvable, but the way we dialogue about the matters. But an example of a perpetual issue is I want to live in the city, you want to live by the beach, I want my kids to go to a private school, you want our kids to go to a state school. A perpetual issue isn’t who’s going to look after me. That’s a need that can be met, that can be discussed, that can be nurtured, that can shift. I say that not as a perpetual issue, because perpetual issues are underpinned by stuckness. And they’re perpetual because I have one set of beliefs and values and you have another and never the two shall meet. But who’s going to look after me? Do you see that as a perpetual?

Kate Halfpenny
Do you know I hadn’t even thought about it, but I love that you’ve said that. I feel this enormous wave of relief, washing over me that you have said that. Thank you so much for seeing that and for saying it. Hopefully not a perpetual issue and I mean I didn’t even know of the perpetual issue phrase. You know, for me it’s just been that this has been the one sticking point in our relationship that I wish was different. It’s a recurrent wound.

Sabina Read
And probably a wound you bought to relationship one, two and three, marriage one, two and three as I’m now calling them.

Kate Halfpenny
I think that’s probably right. I think that’s probably right. But that doesn’t mean, you know, wounds can heal and shift. Yeah, look, I’ve actually been super proud of all my three marriages and the way that they have been navigated and resolved. And I actually think, this will sound funny, that I reckon I’m an awesome wife.

Sabina Read
Here here, I hear that. That’s very clear, that’s very clear.

Kate Halfpenny
I think that I am and I hope that I’m a really good ex-wife. And you know, I love Chris so much and I love being married to him. Are there things that I would wanna change? Absolutely, totally, any day of the week. But I have so much fun with him and I have so much respect for what he’s done and the way that he has chosen, I feel like he has chosen us. Yes, he chose to stay alive. That was a big driver, but he did choose us. And it could, it would have been easy for him to walk away, you know, at a time when he was saying to me, “I dream of being in a room by myself with a bottle of vodka and you are a hundred Ks away.” You know, like for a lot of the time, I was the fun police other than the wife or the love interest, if you like. And I love that he switched that around and that he did choose us. So, you know, it is a second and third marriage is that it’s a tricky beast. Because as I said, you don’t have that, the children that bind you and the, you know, you’re not starting from scratch and creating all of these things together. You have to be enough for each other and hopefully we are.

Sabina Read
Thank you Kate for sharing. We’ve been on quite the journey. I know that your words will be really deeply impactful of course in the relationship space and with the shadow of addiction that is present in so many relationships and you kick the shame to the curb and speak with such vulnerability and also gratitude and love alongside the love and the gratitude and the care can also sit deep anger and resentment and fear they can coexist.

Kate Halfpenny
Yes and I am crying now. Thank you Sabina for this lovely conversation.
Do other people cry?

Sabina Read
Yeah.

Kate Halfpenny
Do they?

Sabina Read
People cry. Because we cry and laugh and I’ve always maintained that in any setting, whether it’s therapy, podcast, friendship, marriage, that levity and pain also coexist, how they cannot both be present would be denying the humanness that sits in all of us. And I’m really deeply grateful for your sharing, I know our listeners will be as well.

Kate Halfpenny
Thank you for the lovely conversation. You know, you are so damn good at what you do. I feel like you have managed to extricate these really personal things from me in a really gentle but firm way. And I’m really grateful.

Sabina Read
Thank you.

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