It's not just divorce that's in the air

Bestselling memoirs and viral personal essays about divorce are part of a larger story: women are questioning the very structure of their lives.

Photo: Umberto

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This morning, I went on KQED’s Forum to talk about this “divorce moment” we’re in with Leslie Jamison, author of the phenomenal memoir Splinters, and host Alexis Madrigal, who writes one of my favorite newsletters, Oakland Garden Club.

Ahead of our chat, I wrote this newsletter, because writing is how I figure out what I think. So now you get a doubleheader: give a read and give a listen. It was a fantastic chat—we truly could have kept going for at least another hour.

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Divorce is in the air.

Last month, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters and Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, both memoirs that deal with divorce, hit the New York Times bestseller list. Emily Gould also went viral with a candid and controversial New York Magazine essay about considering a divorce. Last year, the poet Maggie Smith published You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir about her divorce, and another bestseller.

I could point to earlier examples, too, including Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down and even Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel-turned-TV-series Fleishman is in Trouble.

Taken together, it feels like, well—as a friend of mine recently put it: “Is everyone getting divorced?” The reality is that divorce has been on the decline since the 1980s and experts currently estimate that around 39 percent of marriages end in divorce—a much lower number than the 50-50 flip-a-coin figure that has been cemented in many of our minds.

Still, these divorce narratives are loudly resonating, which says plenty about this current moment. Women are hungry for narratives that challenge the patriarchal status quo around marriage, motherhood, and sex.

It’s not just divorce that’s in the air. Consider Molly Roden Winter’s More, a memoir about her polyamorous marriage, another recent bestseller. She doesn’t get divorced, but it is a story about a woman wrestling with the suffocating norms and constraints in her life. There are also recent buzzy books like Amanda Montei’s Touched Out, which explores the overlaps of rape culture with the coercions of motherhood, and Minna Dubin’s Mom Rage, which grapples with the anger that many women feel in motherhood. 

All of these books question the framework of women’s lives, the limitations of their expected roles, and the lies they’ve been sold. The interest in such narratives isn’t surprising given the cultural and political turmoil of the last several years—#MeToo, the pandemic, and the overturn of Roe v. Wade. For many women, these events not only underscored the depths of their anger, outrage, and unhappiness, but also the inequities and structural forces that control their lives.

It pushed them to turn a critical eye toward their most intimate roles and relationships, especially within the context of heterosexual marriage.

In fact, it was against the backdrop of #MeToo, and in the early days of maternity leave, that Montei started working toward the thesis of her book, which is one of the most original and provocative pieces of feminist writing I’ve read in the last few years. As she told me back in September:

I was home alone, feeling totally alienated from my body and totally out of control, like I had no sense of autonomy, no real grasp on my identity or my life. That really threw a lot into relief for me, to witness all these public declarations of assault from afar, having been working through a lot of this in my mind, and noticing how so much of that was being echoed by my experience as a new mom.

Clearly, she’s not alone. The interest in these stories is a reflection of that.

These books reveal more than just reader demand, though. Read them alongside each other and a major theme emerges: the unequal division of labor within the household. This is a reality borne out by all the research telling us that women in heterosexual marriages spend much more time on household chores than men. (In same-sex relationships, there's a much more even splitting of chores—unless the couple has kids, in which case, one partner tends to do the bulk of domestic labor.)

In some of these books, that imbalance is a breaking point that spells divorce.

In This American Ex-Wife, a memoir-meets-manifesto, an inciting incident is Lenz’s husband failing once again to take out the trash. Of course, it’s not just about the trash, which he leaves in a precarious position such that it spills all over the floor. It’s also about how she has done the overwhelming majority of chores and childcare for the duration of their marriage, and how he resents her request that he do his fair share now that her career is taking off.

Post-divorce, says Lenz, she has less housework to do because she doesn’t have another adult to clean up after. What’s more, she has court-mandated 50-50 joint custody, meaning her ex-husband is required to contribute his fair share of childcare, for the first time in his life.

This dynamic shows up in Gould’s essay, too: she considered divorce at least in part because of the way her work took a backseat in the relationship. “He had always put his career before mine; while I had tended to our children during the pandemic, he had written a book about parenting,” she writes. “I tried to balance writing my own novel with drop-offs, pickups, sick days, and planning meals and shopping and cooking… .”

The unequal division of household labor doesn’t just contribute to divorce. In Winter’s More, it contributes to her hunger to break out of domesticity by way of polyamory. It’s her escape from her “life as the Wiper of Noses, the Doer of Dishes, the Nag in Residence.” Her husband works obsessively and stays late at the office, leaving her to do school drop-off and pick-up, pack lunches, cook dinner, put the kids to bed—all of it.

It’s like he has “some sort of allergy to domesticity,” as she puts it in the middle of an argument. After they open their marriage—at his suggestion—one of the things that she fantasizes about is her new paramour making dinner for her.

When her husband starts seeing other people, it becomes clear that all those years he was working late and skipping out on domestic duties, he could have just chosen to come home, because now he’s routinely “blowing off work” to be with his other lovers. He is free to “do as he pleases, to go to hotels without worrying about details such as bedtimes or babysitters.” Meanwhile, Winter facilitates childcare, squeezes in her trysts where she can, and fools around in bathrooms and co-working spaces.

Another theme that jumps out in these recent books is the way a woman’s professional success can destabilize a heterosexual marriage. In Splinters, Jamison’s husband, a writer, reacts with jealousy to her professional success. It’s not the sole reason their marriage falls apart, but it is one of many fractures. As she writes of his book, “It didn’t get the reception he had hoped for… I could feel him struggling,” she writes. “I wished there was a way to say, Your work matters, that didn’t involve muting my own.”

Similarly, among the first cracks in Smith’s marriage: a poem of hers goes viral, she achieves overnight fame, and her husband doesn't like it. In This American Ex-Wife, Lenz starts to realize her professional dreams and the power dynamic in the relationship shifts. Her husband’s reaction to that shift is part of what breaks the marriage.

What do all of these individual narratives tell us? It’s not just that inequity powerfully persists within heterosexual marriage. More disturbingly, that inequity is often what holds heterosexual marriage together. In many of these books, you see the scale tip toward equity and the marriage falls apart.

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