I Knew I Was Doing Something Wrong

For some ex-spouses, revenge is not the point. Writing about divorce can be good for readership.

"The bloggers who are doing the best are those who are injecting their personal lives," said Penelope Trunk, the author of the Brazen Careerist blog, who has written frequently in the past year about the collapse of her 15-year marriage.

Ms. Trunk wrote about going to what she thought was a first session with a new marriage counselor chosen by her husband only to discover it was a divorce lawyer's office. That was one of her most popular posts.

More painfully, she has written about the problems of a son who has Asberger's [sic] syndrome and said that both she and her husband believed the challenges of raising him helped cause their divorce.

But this kind of brutal honesty is not a good idea for children, especially since most harbor feelings of guilt about their parents' divorce anyway, said Irene Goldenberg, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"It is not good for children to get personal information in that way," Dr. Goldenberg said. "And people have to consider doing things in the heat of the moment. The way they feel now will not be how they feel in two years, and there is no way it can be retrieved."

Ms. Truck [sic] disagrees.

"It is a generational issue," she said. "We think it will be a big deal, but it won’t be to them. By the time they are old enough to read it, they will have spent their entire life online. It will be like, 'Oh yeah, I expected that.'"