The Professional Divorce - Anju Anna Thomas

The most devastating layoffs don’t announce themselves. They arrive as an email, before your coffee is finished, taking not just your job but the identity you spent twenty years building. 

The Professional Divorce is the story of what happens next.

When a global restructuring ended Anju’s fifteen-year career with one company, she found herself navigating unemployment for the first time. At the same time, she was managing her mother’s repeated ICU admissions, completing a self-funded post-graduate programme at IIM Kozhikode, and confronting perimenopause that had been quietly amplifying every emotion for two years. 

This is not a book about what to do after a layoff. It is the book that lives inside the experience - the grief with nowhere to land, the identity stripped away with the title, the bruising silence of a phone that once never stopped ringing, and the financial arithmetic of a severance slowly running out. 

Honest, funny in places, devastating in others, and without the performance of having handled it gracefully, The Professional Divorce is the memoir millions of professional women have lived but rarely seen on a page. 

Until now.