Editor’s note: Luanne Rice is the author of The Deep Blue Sea For Beginners, just published by Bantam. She has written 26 other novels, many of them New York Times bestsellers.

This year — the year my cosmic sweater began to unravel — I began to write The Deep Blue Sea For Beginners. I wrote it because I felt I had to knit life back together with words. Among other things, I’m D-3, which means I’ve been divorced three times. My third was so spectacular that it made Liz Smith’s column not once but twice, and involved the following dialogue with an FBI Agent:

Me: "But he doesn’t seem like a con man!"

FBI agent: "Do you think con men announce they’re con men? Did you meet him at church? A self-help meeting?"

Me: "He said he could help me believe in myself again."

FBI agent: (chuckle) "He’s got it down. He’s a predator. You were vulnerable. Did he ask what you did for a living?"

Me: "I told him I was a writer. He wanted to see my work … we walked to a Barnes & Noble."

FBI agent: "Guaranteed, he was calculating your assets before you showed him half your shelf."  

That conversation took place five years into a brutal, dishonest, abusive marriage. By that time I’d dropped or been dropped by all my friends. One friend said he felt I was "disappearing." I figured it was because I wore long, flowing things and straw hats. "I don’t mean your clothes," he said. "You. Where are you in there? What happened to Luanne?"

Walking on eggshells changes one’s life. I hid from my friends and family, even from myself. I wrote constantly, two books a year; fiction, intense and emotional, kept me so much saner than life with the man I’d married.

I wound up knocking on the door of an office — Domestic Violence Valley Shore Services. I explained to the woman who answered I probably didn’t belong; after all, my husband had never laid a hand on me. But as I spoke, began to tell my story, I felt myself start to melt, disintegrate, and to this day I can’t believe the howls that came from my body. The wonderful counselors there told me I did belong, that I bore scars inside my body — my heart and spirit — harder to heal than any bruise or broken bone.

My counselor taught me to not call him "my" husband, that it was demeaning to claim someone who was destroying me. "Call him by his name — he’s not yours," she said. I attended the Thursday night group. You could tell the new women: deer frozen in headlights. And the things we would say: "He doesn’t mean it." "He said it would never happen again." "He was abused as a child." We had more compassion for our abusers than for ourselves.

I left my third husband. He hired a celebrity lawyer — an abusive divorce to follow an abusive marriage. They hinted they might subpoena my computer; to them, if I was writing, it meant money. When I heard that — sitting on the witness stand — I felt as if I’d been stabbed. Taking a writer’s computer is like stealing her soul. It was December, and dark — the court recessed for Christmas. I went to my house, grabbed my computer and heaved it into the Long Island Sound. Later, when the subpoena did come, I told them to "dive for it."