Opt Out

“Everything will be fine.”
That is what Mary and John promise their children when they announce their divorce. 

For Mary and John, the end of their marriage offers a long-delayed escape from mutual dissatisfaction. But separation also exposes the hurt, resentment, and unspoken failures that have shaped their relationship—and forces them to confront the ways they have fallen short, both as partners and as parents. As John moves toward a second chance at love, buoyed by the continued affection of his children, Mary finds herself adrift. Having spent her life seeking the approval of others, she is ill-prepared for the upheaval that now threatens to dismantle everything she thought she was.

Told through alternating perspectives, Opt Out traces Mary and John’s diverging paths in the aftermath of their separation. Smart, intimate, and unflinching, it interrogates the quiet tyranny of gender roles and reckons with our idealised notions of motherhood—exploring how difficult it can be to step out of one life in order to imagine another.