If you ever wondered why you never hear Carrie Bradshaw utter the deadly "D" word when referring to her own slender self, the reason becomes clear in The Heartbreak Diet, a new book by Thorina Rose. Bradshaw, as personified by the wafer-thin Sarah Jessica Parker, regularly had her heart broken on Sex in the City. But she remained amazingly slim - and always optimistic.

Cover and inside pages from The Heartbreak Diet by Thorina Rose, courtesy Chronicle Books.

Thorina Rose, a San Francisco-based artist known for her illustrations of fashion and art-world icons and sexy yoga moves, charts the surprising collapse of her marriage, then the struggle and adventure of starting over. Her sweet revenge for being ditched takes the form of a graphic novel - or in this case, a graphic memoir.

Using coping mechanisms such as denial, shrinkage, and the highly recommended girlfriends workshop, Rose also draws strength from the words of wise women. For example, Gloria Steinem: "I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career." Shelly Winters: "All marriages are happy. It's trying to live together afterward that causes all the problems." And Dolly Parton: "The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."

Rose quickly finds out that retail therapy is not helpful, but leaning on friends, and travels with gay men, turn out to be very useful. As she negotiates the tangled web of single-motherhood, visitation rights, and dating, she discovers that creativity is, in fact, its own reward. The illustrator becomes a painter, gets her work into galleries and finds real happiness in the process. The rest, she believes, will surely come.

Tomorrow night, Thorina Rose gives a reading from The Heartbreak Diet: A Story of Family, Fidelity and Starting Over (Chronicle Books) at The Booksmith, 1644 Haight Street, San Francisco, starting at 7:30 pm. For information: 415-863-8688.