Bored of the Rings

The Monday that Lyz Lenz knew her marriage was over, she returned home late from a research trip to find the kitchen floor littered with garbage. Her husband had put a trash bag on the breakfast nook bench; it had fallen and opened, depositing a trail of orange peels, Goldfish crackers, wet napkins, and old cheese chunks. For Lenz, this carelessness was not a minor infraction in the history of a twelve-year marriage but the ultimate manifestation of its dysfunction. She had long felt her relationship was based on an unfair division of labour. Now, worn out from caring for small children, she decided to call it quits. The act of leaving inspired a book that taps into so many potent pop feminism tropes. “I want to tell you that breaking is our power,” the author based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, writes. “I want to tell you that walking away is a strength.”

This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life recounts a lacklustre union to a man Lenz portrays as a religious Trump voter who avoided housework and child care and pressured her to give up political writing to pen a mystery novel instead, preferably at night after the kids were in bed. “It soon became clear I could be successful or I could be married,” she recalls. The final straw came when she discovered he’d been hiding items he disapproved of in the basement, such as her “Write like a Motherfucker” coffee mug. Lenz moved on, universalizing her own unhappy matrimony, launching an indictment against the “commonplace horror” of heterosexual marriage itself, setting fire to her wedding dress, and musing about what a rejection of the age‑old institution might mean for women’s liberation writ large.

It does not seem to occur to Lenz that plenty of successful women are happily married to men, that not all marriages are unequal, or even that all men are unique individuals, as all women are. Similarly, Lenz seems unaware that a good number of women find fulfillment outside the work world — in family life, friendships, community, hobbies, or faith. Perhaps because of her narrow careerist frame, Lenz’s post-divorce life often reads as grim and joyless, featuring overwork, drinking, and detached sexual liaisons with men (“I owed them nothing”), including tangles with a fellow liberal writer who screamed at her and kicked her out of the car during arguments and wouldn’t wear condoms. In another deeply disturbing instance, a self-proclaimed feminist forced himself on her. It is curious, then, that This American Ex‑Wife has received so much cheerleading press attention, with the men’s magazine Esquire proclaiming it “a rousing and exuberant cry for a reckoning” and CBC Radio’s Ideas building an entire program around its themes. The mountain of coverage illustrates the extent to which Lenz’s heteropessimism has gone mainstream.

It all comes at a moment when women across the West are talking a lot about divorce. And for what is typically a painful life event, the mood in the zeitgeist is oddly euphoric, depicting divorce not as a sad dissolution of an intimate bond but rather as an upbeat feminist flex. The glamorization of divorce shows up in divorce-themed albums from Adele and Ariana Grande and in the new vogue for hosting divorce parties. It is also apparent in a recent Ali Wong stand‑up comedy special, Single Lady (“I really do believe that forty is the golden age — to get divorced”), in New York Times essays with titles like “Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love,” and in a wave of divorce memoirs, of which This American Ex‑Wife is but one example. “In this vision of feminism,” the cultural critic Kat Rosenfield writes of the trend, “marriage is a trap, divorce is a superpower, and women are not so much people as Strong Female Characters.”

During the months when Lenz was writing her book, she returned again and again to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, a loose fictionalization of the iconic writer’s split from the Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. To make sense of the current divorce memoir fad, we too must look back four decades to Heartburn’s release.

The novel scandalized the literary establishment when it hit bookstores in 1983, but it struck a chord with readers. Warm, witty, and self-deprecating, Heartburn is full of delicious details about married life, with a legendary vinaigrette recipe thrown in for good measure. The protagonist, Rachel, is a cookbook writer who is seven months pregnant when she discovers her husband, Mark, a prominent Washington columnist, is having an affair. Rachel is broken-hearted as her life unravels, but her anguish is swiftly transformed into comic fodder. Instead of wallowing as Mark surreptitiously shops for real estate with his new paramour, Rachel cooks comfort food, spreads rumours that her romantic rival has an infection, goes to therapy, and satirizes her husband. In the face of betrayal, Rachel is no stoic, but she is endearingly allergic to self-pity. “I am terrified of being alone, and I can’t bear the idea of divorce,” she reflects in one pivotal scene, but “I can’t stand feeling sorry for myself. I can’t stand feeling like a victim.” And then she throws a key lime pie in her husband’s face.

Writing about the incident some time later, Rachel recalls that her therapist once asked her why she felt compelled to turn everything into copy. “Because if I tell the story, I control the version,” she famously replies. That one sentence has been quoted ad infinitum, but Rachel in fact says more: “Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much.” And then: “Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”

In recent years, Heartburn’s humour and tenacity and messy complexity have receded from view, and the book has been remembered instead for a straightforward message of female empowerment. “It’s undeniable that Heartburn achieved what she wanted it to,” Sophie Gilbert wrote in The Atlantic, on the fortieth anniversary of the novel’s publication. “It cast the story of her marriage definitively in her terms.” But such revisionism elides the humanity in the final pages of the novel, which find Rachel, on her last day in Washington before moving back to New York, cooking dinner, teaching her husband how to make the coveted vinaigrette, and retiring to bed for a bittersweet embrace. Mark then falls asleep, and Rachel recalls a silly song he used to sing to her, which made her feel happy in ways she hadn’t imagined possible. She realizes, lying next to him, that she can no longer remember the lyrics: “Which was not the worst way to begin to forget.”

If Ephron’s more conflicted and humane portrayal of marital breakdown has faded over time, one large reason would be the publication of Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia, which Kat Rosenfield has described on my podcast as “the OG divorce memoir.” In the 2006 book, Elizabeth Gilbert drew heavily on Heartburn’s self-empowerment theme, as she ditched a hapless husband to pursue a fleeting romance and then indulged in wanderlust, eating pizza in Italy, joining an ashram in India, and falling in love again in Indonesia. Of course, she ultimately ended up on Oprah Winfrey’s couch — rich, famous, and adored by a new husband and legions of fans. Gilbert’s heroic journey thus recast divorce as an intoxicating adventure. In the process, Eat Pray Love established the central elements of the genre it pioneered: an abhorrence of domestic life, an interior gaze, a tendency to prioritize one’s own needs and desires, and — this is key — an insistence on dressing all of that up as liberation.

The divorce memoirs that have followed take pages from this basic playbook. Rachel Cusk’s cerebral Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation offers a hyperliterary version of the story, in which the British author weaves together ruminations on the breakup of her own marriage with sweeping pronouncements about gender dynamics. In Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution, the Teen Vogue columnist Nona Willis Aronowitz, daughter of the famed sex-positive feminist Ellen Willis, recounts leaving her husband, with whom she shared a companionable relationship, to pursue transgressive sex with strangers. The poet Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful details her husband’s affair and his lack of support for her career, but it ultimately focuses on self-actualization. And Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story sees Leslie Jamison leave a husband who resents her success, taking refuge in the exquisite closeness between mother and daughter that’s born of single parenthood.

Although these titles differ in nuance and thoughtfulness, as well as literary merit, all suffer from some level of unconscious solipsism. Reading them, one can’t help but wonder about the spouses, children, friends, and family lurking in the background, and how they might think and feel about the tales being told.

It’s no accident that these memoirs are shaped by a liberal feminist ethos that’s laser-focused on maximizing individual autonomy, often to the exclusion of all else. Such an ideology appears incompatible, however, with the project of forging healthy, reciprocal relationships. After all, if you believe your highest calling is to pursue your own happiness, you forgo interdependence, which obviously requires balancing your needs and desires with those of others.

Given that ethos, it’s unsurprising that women’s accounts of overcoming marriage crises are few and far between. There is, however, a New York essay by Emily Gould, “The Lure of Divorce,” which went viral when it appeared last February. It demonstrates what such a memoir might look like.

Seven years into her marriage, Gould experienced a period of “sky-high stress” and asked her psychiatrist to increase her antidepressants. Agitated and drinking with abandon, she wound up in a manic state that convinced her that her marriage was over. She checked into a psych ward (where her husband visited, delivering gluten-free breakfast sandwiches) and published a newsletter while crowdsourcing legal fees for her divorce. Returning from the hospital, Gould built a case against her husband: she resented him for being more accomplished, for placing his career above hers, for putting himself in danger reporting in Ukraine, for “going out into the greater world while I tended to lunches, homework, and laundry as though everything were normal.” All the while, she read compulsively, gorging on the divorce memoir canon: “I felt I was preparing myself for what was coming.”

Gould saw herself as the wronged party but then confessed in couples therapy: “Sometime post–Last Fight and pre-hospitalization, I had managed to cheat on my husband.” This revelation loosened the grip of the narrative that had taken hold of her, and she began to contemplate her husband’s side of the story. She noticed how much weight he’d lost and how wounded he appeared. She felt his ribs through his shirt when he asked her for a hug in the kitchen. Gould’s growing sympathy helped her remember the love they shared, the things that were not broken, the fact that “we could talk to each other as we could to no one else.” She understood that to move forward, each had to forgive the other for a myriad of offences, big and small. Slowly, they pulled back from the brink. And in this way, a breakdown led to a breakthrough.