With over 43 percent of marriages doomed to failure, Bride’s, Parenting, and Modern Maturity don’t always cover the all important phases in the average American’s life. What happens to those who find themselves in the process of untying the knot, and scour the stands for info on lawyers instead of priests, alimony in lieu of joint tenancy, and custody arrangements rather than prenups? Those are precisely the questions that the savvy minds behind Divorce magazine aim to answer. With message boards, personal ads, and, um, humor columns, the Toronto-based publication (founded by two people who recently got married, though not to each other) feeds its 100,000 subscribers handy information on how to manage break-up details — and throws in the odd celebrity reference whenever possible. Bruce Willis & Demi Moore! Nicole Kidman & Tom Cruise! Dennis Quaid & Meg Ryan! See, they’re beautiful and rich, and they did it.

Last month, Divorce toasted its five-year anniversary of doling out tips and tricks on smoothing over potentially “toxic” situations. We talked with editorial director Diana Shepherd about her transition from Wedding Bells to Divorce, the magazine’s columnists Ivana Trump and John Gray, and the ongoing search for a sugar-daddy publisher to shack up with.

Q: Who’s the typical reader of Divorce?

A: Somewhere between 65 and 75 percent of our readers are women. In terms of age, most are in their early 30s. Most of our readers are recently divorced, though we have some who’ve been divorced for more than 20 years.

Q: People are always going to get divorced. Have you done better as more people decide to split?

A: Divorce rates really haven’t grown in the past 10 years. There’s a perception that the divorce rate is really on the rise, but it’s been really stable — there may be a couple thousand more or less, but it’s almost the same. This is an ever-renewing market.

Q: Like many marriages, the divorce process doesn’t last forever. How do you hold on to your readers after they move on?

A: We don’t expect to have a reader for more than three years, at most. We’re not looking to have a subscriber stay with us for 20 years — we’re not looking to give out a football clock.

After they move on, there’s going to be a new crop coming in. It’s really similar to the wedding market.

Q: Actually, I wanted to ask you about that. I understand you joined forces with Divorce’s publisher, Dan Couvrette, when you were both at a wedding magazine. How did you find the transition from wedding to divorce?

A: Yes, we were at Wedding Bells, a Canadian bridal magazine. It’s a sad comment to say that it’s a natural transition. But it’s a reality for a lot of people.

We started it in many ways to help ourselves. Dan was going through a divorce, and I had started to date a man going through a divorce with three young children. Neither of them could find anything on the newsstand to answer their questions.

Q: You have two celebrity weekly columnists on the Web site, Ivana Trump and John Gray. Why them?

A: Ivana and Donald had started having one of those toxic divorces. And it was in public, for everyone to see and comment on. They made a conscious decision to stop that and develop a friendship together for the sake of their children.... The other thing is that everyone knew that Donald had been cheating on her. She decided it was not going to stop her. She was going to reinvent herself as a businesswoman. And we think John Gray [the author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus] will be a really good balance for Ivana.

Q: Is Divorce looking to get hitched to a major publisher?

A: Yes, we are. Dan and I started it out-of-pocket, with $500,000. We’ve taken it a long way, but we’ve always had to do things on a shoestring. The one thing that’s lacking is resources.

Issue Date: April 26 - May 3, 2001