After all, to observe was to be accepted and to be accepted was to be loved. The memoir of a woman who leaves her faith and her marriage and sets out to navigate the terrifying, liberating terrain of a newly mapless worldīorn and raised in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish family, Tova Mirvis committed herself to observing the rules and rituals prescribed by this way of life. In 2017 she published a memoir, The Book of Separation, in which she discussed her divorce, her decision to leave the Orthodox community, and the bittersweet realities of navigating a new life as a single mother.

She followed this success with The Outside World in 2004 and Visible City in 2014, and published numerous essays in The New York Times Review of Books, Poets and Writers, and other periodicals. In 1999, she published her first novel, The Ladies’ Auxiliary, about a widowed convert entering the Orthodox community in Mirvis’s native Memphis. Mirvis graduated from Columbia University in 1995 and immediately went on to earn an MFA from Columbia in 1998. In her novels, Tova Mirvis returns to the themes of characters living in Orthodox communities while struggling with their faith.

Her essays have appeared in various newspapers including The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Globe Magazine, and Poets and Writers, and her fiction has been broadcast on National Public Radio.

Tova Mirvis is the author of the memoir The Book of Separation as well as three novels, Visible City, The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller.

The book of separation tova mirvis