Sarah Jessica Parker Finds Hope in 'Divorce'

Actress Sarah Jessica Parker is apologizing for calling early and then, before she even gets into the reason for her call — the Season 2 premiere of her HBO series Divorce — begins a hilarious off-topic commiseration about the decided lack of style in the modern Brownie uniform needed by her 8-year-old twins, Tabitha and Loretta. “It’s awful,” she moans, as she recalls dreamily the Brownie beanies and sashes of her youth. “They were beautiful!” Parker further details how she searched Etsy for vintage uniforms for the girls and when she found them? “They politely declined,” she says, sighing.

On to the topic at hand. As the new season of Divorce gets underway Sunday, Parker talks about it as both complex and promising. The painful, heartbreaking and oftentimes funny uncoupling of longtime marrieds Frances (Parker) and Robert Dufresne (Thomas Haden Church) — and the impact it has on friends and family — was characterized by bitterness and legal one-upmanship in the first season. Now there's a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel. 

“The battle, for the most part, is over and [there's] an attempt at some light and air, metaphorically and literally, and a new beginning," Parker says. "New beginnings always feel they are loaded with promise. But the truth is always more complex.”

Parker says she finds it gratifying that fans of the show have chosen camps, alternatively rooting for Frances and then Robert as they trudge through their separation. “I, too, flip back and forth. I am often on Robert’s side as I read the scripts and even as I am in the middle of the scene,” she says. “It is not important to me that an audience only relates to Frances because then we are not painting an accurate portrait of real human beings.”

And unlike some fans, Parker says she doesn’t find Frances unlikable. Rather, “I like that she can be chilly and exacting and withholding,” she says. “And I like that she is wanting very much to make changes that are meaningful to her. The line that she says in the pilot (episode) says it all. She says to him, ‘I want to save my life while I still can.’ And that is at the root of every decision that she makes. It doesn’t mean she goes about it in a way that is always admirable, but she certainly wants to do right by the people she loves — and even by Robert.”

Sarah Jessica Parker and Thomas Haden Church in "Divorce"

HBO

More painful and realistic this season is the estrangement with their teenage daughter, Lila, who lays the dissolution of her parents' marriage at her mother’s feet. “Sometimes I think that mothers are offered up more of that [anger] because it is safer,” Parker says. “There is a presumption of love.”