YEARS AGO, not long after ending a marriage, I was having coffee with two women, new acquaintances, when we discovered that we were all divorced. “Yay!” one cried. “Hot Divorcées Club!” Something shrank and recoiled in me. Why must we be hot? Couldn’t we just be divorced? Plus, what in divorce, a thing about as common as marriage, made it worthy of a club? Both being married and being divorced seemed equally empty categories on which to stake an identity. That these two ladies were above average in the physical attractiveness stakes is not the point, nor is that semi-facetious striving for common ground in which new female friendships are forced or forged. The point was we couldn’t just be women who’d been married and now were not.
In recent years, a kind of Hot Divorcées Club has assembled itself in Anglophone writing via a remarkable proliferation of contemporary divorce narratives. These include straightforward memoirs like The Cost of Living and Real Estate by Deborah Levy, You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith, Splinters by Leslie Jamison, and Men Have Called Her Crazy by Anna Marie Tendler. Others, like A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs and This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz, mix memoir with cultural criticism. Then there are novels with a strong flavor of the autobiographical: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offil, Liars by Sarah Manguso, and All Fours by Miranda July (even if, strictly speaking, July’s novel concerns heterosexual separation rather than actual legal divorce). In addition to the generational overlap of their authors, these books also share a common mood: a wind of emancipation blows about, fitfully, through the genre.
Why, when divorce in the US and the UK is at last widespread, destigmatized, and more legally unimpeded than ever, should it have this literary salience? The question becomes more puzzling when one notes that the books in question are overwhelmingly authored by a certain kind of woman: she is white, straight (or at least separated from a man), cisgender, middle class, and in her thirties or forties—a professional writer before her divorce, she remains one afterward. She belongs, in other words, to one of the demographics whose members are least likely to be socially punished or economically penalized for getting out of a marriage. I’m friendly with some of these women—a friendliness based, in large part, on admiration for their work. But what puzzles me is that divorce has acquired increasing literary significance to the very degree that marriage has forfeited social meaning.
If Hot Divorcées Club possesses a patron saint, or rather a single instance of holy iconography, it’s to be found in that deliciously memeable paparazzi shot of Nicole Kidman supposedly leaving her attorney’s office after the finalization of her divorce from Tom Cruise. Fists balled in triumph, face thrown back and tilted upward, eyes screwed shut as if in orgasmic exultation, she is striding out into the literal sunlight of her new life as if her whole being is resounding with one victorious “Yes!” of relief. It is 2001, and she is thirty-four years old.
A brief exegesis of the image features in one of the newest additions to the divorce-narrative genre, Haley Mlotek’s thoughtful and elegantly equivocal No Fault. Where I see one emotion—of release—in full force, Mlotek sees distinct ambivalence. She describes Kidman’s face in the photo as both “pained and relieved,” adding: “The contradictions of her expressions said a lot more than I could have.” (Incidentally, in November of last year the actor told GQ that the photo wasn’t authentic: “That was not me; that was from a film, that wasn’t real life.” Curiously, however, Kidman still has not specified which film.) The contradictions and ambivalence that Mlotek perceives are typical of the mode of No Fault, which is devoid of both dogmatism (“all men are trash!”) and heroine-ism (“I escaped mine!”) in a way not always true of its predecessors. Operating in the voguish category of memoir meets cultural history, the bookconsists of three sections, respectively concerning a history of American divorce, its representations in popular culture, and Mlotek’s own experience, although the matter of her own divorce percolates throughout. Mlotek met her sweetheart at sixteen and was with him for twelve years before they got married. Thirteen months after their wedding, and by mutual agreement, her husband moved out. She seems to still be trying to make sense of this event; the book’s tone is one of languid shock. With a Didionish blend of fatalism and lucidity, Mlotek writes, “I have looked for guidance everywhere but real life.” As if to demonstrate this evasiveness, she tells us: “I want you to ask if I’ve read Anna Karenina. I do not want you to ask what I would do for love.”
But what an archive of not-real life she’s amassed—particularly in her section on the pop-cultural history of uncoupling. No Fault brims with movies, images, other books, other people’s anecdotes—“divorce content,” as Mlotek puts it. Reading her book can feel like sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by an unmarshaled welter of artifacts. There is richness here, and exhilaration, if not quite a thesis about what divorce means either in general or to her. Mlotek, certainly not a polemicist, admits that she’s attracted to the writings of “people who lived through—perhaps even can be credited as the architects of—real revolution.” She is not drawn, as you might imagine, to their conviction and force of vision, but instead to the speculative, tentative undertaking of trying to imagine a world that hasn’t yet come to be: “Would this work, they wonder, about their actions or their essays or any attempt they made to build something more than what was already familiar. Could it? Everything they made was just an offering, rather than an answer.” Cool and curious, circling and never settling, this is a book of offerings, not answers. As such, the book’s title—an allusion to the legal dissolution of marriage that does not require any reason beyond one spouse’s wish to divorce—takes on a shadow meaning. Just as “no fault” obviates the laying of blame on one party, No Fault the book is disinclined to give either a firm narrative of Mlotek’s own divorce or a theory of the meaning of contemporary marriage. Firm narratives are precisely what people love to confect and clutch at the end of a marriage, or indeed any relationship. Mlotek declines to give the full “what happened” story of hers, mostly because she has yet to land and perhaps will never land on an answer: “My friends and I are alike in that we both had no idea why my marriage ended.” As she explains, or doesn’t quite:
Because I don’t tell stories, everyone thinks I have secrets. I try, I swear I try, but I end up making eye contact with the table and saying non sequiturs so nonsensical I might as well be speaking in tongues. . . . I’m thinking I protest when friends tell me I’m too quiet, but I do have a secret, and it’s that I have a broken television set where my brain used to be. I am ashamed of the lo-fi quality of my thoughts. They are constant and circular, a staticky skimming of the surface.
Beyond this self-deprecating account of her own neurology, there may be another reason for this demurral—and for the book’s overall mood of perplexed diffusion. The problem is not that this highly intelligent writer has a broken television set of a mind. The problem is larger: in 2025, divorce simply does not have the same kind of legibly feminist—and emancipatory—thrust it had decades ago. It may wish to look like Nicole Kidman exiting the attorney’s office; but it can’t feel like such a release, for the simple reason that marriage doesn’t represent the same oppression it once did. If we take the totemic force of the Kidman image to be something like “heterosexual marriage = prison,” it goes a little wobbly when you remember the actor has been married to her second husband, Keith Urban, for nearly two decades. But in Hot Divorcées Club, an understandable if bad faith heterofatalism (coined by the New York Times’s Marie Solis, the term is a further downgrading from “heteropessimism”) takes divorce as an exclusively female concern and liberation as its given meaning.
One of Mlotek’s touchstones is a work by sociologist Jessie Bernard, from 1972. In The Future of Marriage Bernard argued that in marriage (then of course an exclusively heterosexual institution) the husband’s quality of life tends to improve, the wife’s to decline. Marriage, Bernard suggested in her minatory study, represents a kind of perdition for women: “It is wives who are driven mad, not by men but by the anachronistic way in which marriage is structured today—or rather, the lifestyle which accompanies marriage today and which demands that all wives be housewives. In truth, being a housewife makes women sick.” Bernard’s indictment of marriage rests on “the lifestyle which accompanies marriage today,” namely, the servitude it demands of women—which was already, in Bernard’s judgment, an anachronism. In a recent paper on the Wages for Housework movement, the political scientist Alyssa Battistoni notes about the 1970s that “theories of housework exploded precisely as the age of the housewife drew to a close.” A similar belatedness haunts the contemporary divorce memoir, in its susceptibility to past paradigms and straw-womaning archetypes.
How much, after all, can a book about marriage from 1972 tell us about marriage in the 2020s? Feminism as a form of social theory needs to evolve with gender relations in the society that it interrogates. Among the most significant changes for women over the past half century has been our mass induction to wage labor and corresponding escape from housewifery. This epochal, ambiguous transformation (which has by no means spared women from unremunerated housework) furnished the context for writing of the ’70s, an era whose literature seems to have shaped my generation of women writers more than any other. But the steely, newfound freedom that courses through the writing of Hardwick, Adler, Babitz, Didion, and Sontag is now no longer new. As one friend of mine put it, it’s as if we want to wear the ideological clothes of our lodestars—Harwick et al.—even if they don’t quite fit us.
Above all, the contemporary divorce narrative seems to subscribe to the ’70s maxim that the personal is political—without much clear delineation of what, today, is political about ending a marriage. Rather than face and analyze your own failings—the personal—it might be easier to brandish the old adage and allow the politics part to overshadow the other part, even if the politics you’re invoking are some decades out of date. (A friend of mine in her mid-seventies recently observed the attitudinal reversal she’s witnessed within her lifetime: once, a woman was shamed for leaving her marriage; now she’s more likely to be shamed for staying.)
The difficulty that much current discussion of divorce has in keeping up with contemporary history is evident in Lyz Lenz’s bestselling This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life. Lenz chose to marry a conservative Christian homophobe who refused to cook or clean and was bad in bed, and she generalizes on this basis about the horror of matrimony as a whole—as a form of bondage that its female victim must heroically escape. Marriage is, Lenz asserts, “how women are disappeared.” Disappeared! As though Pinochet himself were the wicked fairy present at all nuptials, waiting to seize and hurl each new wife from the metaphorical helicopter. At one point, Lenz complains that “our television shows and movies are filled with grizzled men, heroes, choosing their careers over their families because these careers, these professions, will save the world. How rare is it to see women doing this and still being allowed to be the heroes of the story?” At this, I wondered if Lenz and I were living in the same world, or at least if we were subjected to the same streaming services. A slew of prominent TV shows from recent years (Hacks, Mare of Eastown, Abbott Elementary, Fleabag, Broad City, The Queen’s Gambit, Veep, Dead Ringers, Insecure, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Killing Eve, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Girls 5Eva, Parks and Recreation, The Mindy Project, The Good Place) refute her claim.
While Lenz is arguing against a defunct historical paradigm, Sarah Manguso’s new novel Liars,seems to refuse history itself as much as possible. Told both chronologically and via fragments—the style for which Manguso’s become celebrated—Liars recounts the story of a marriage from courtship to contempt to, finally, betrayal (he cheats on her with another woman) and the relationship’s dissolution. Yet the specifics of John and Jane’s soured relationship seem deployed only to argue for the timeless and universal misery of wedlock—what Chaucer’s Wife of Bath calls the “woe that married life affords.” The details simply demonstrate how, as Jane bitterly recounts, a woman can get “enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.” The presentation of John and Jane as everyman-husband and everywoman-wife further implies that marriage is a transhistorical problem, unchanged and unchanging. “A husband,” Jane tells us, “might be nothing but a bottomless pit of entitlement. You can throw all your love and energy and attention down into it and the hole will never fill.” Indeed! “A” husband might well be. So might “a” wife. So might a trapeze artist, a tax attorney, a Berliner, a vegan, a senator, a best friend, a nail technician, a polyamorist. What sort of an identity is “husband” in the year 2025? What meaning can it have?
In considering that question, it’s worth remembering that the liberal America from which most of these works emerge is only half the story. A bifurcation of sexual norms post-#MeToo has produced warring worlds of gender. In one corner, a nightmarish carnival of misogyny in which sexual assault is chortled at, a reelected president includes fellow alleged sex offenders in his cabinet, and tens of thousands of men (giving rise to the awful coinage “the manosphere”) take to the internet to post the words “your body, my choice.” The unbearable sexism of this world might help explain the misprisions at play in the other world. Here, among liberals and leftists, it so often seems as though the distant enemy—the emblem of toxic masculinity newly reinstalled in the White House—is being attacked through the near enemy: the disappointing husband in your own house. Manguso’s Jane, for example, litanizes the feckless John’s shortcomingswith a rage so volcanic that you suspect his domestic failures, maddening though they are, must be more trigger than cause. “He’d promised to vacuum the living room . . . but by the end of the day he had back spasms from picking up the baby improperly”; “That morning he’d bought yet another stack of comic books and overspent on fancy cheese, as he did every time we had guests.” Purchasing books and cheese, not vacuuming while experiencing back pain—heinous crimes, all. Sylvia Plath’s teenage poem “I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt” alludes to some terribly tragic, wounding event suffered by the poet. The terribly tragic, wounding event turns out to have been her grandmother accidentally smudging a pastel drawing of Plath’s. Figuratively speaking, the pastel drawing in Liars seems to be a self-portrait of righteous victimhood. To sustain that portrait—an essentially dehumanized version of self as Wronged Wife (an archetype that surely does a woman about as much good as the archetype of housewife; both traduce, stifle, and disfigure personhood)—it’s necessary to similarly dehumanize, exaggerate and monsterize the opposite number on whom it depends, Bad Husband. Divorce, in these new divorce narratives, tends not to be a relational affair, but instead a phenomenon of the self. The self, however, is not always held to account—when holding oneself to account is precisely the implicit pact of autobiographical writing. At one point, Jane rails against John’s use of the passive voice, what she calls “the grammar of perfect innocence.” A few pages later, a male journalist visits Jane to interview her for a feature: “When,” Jane tells us, “an entire civilization tells you that you owe that cock a good suck and fuck, it isn’t personal failure when you give in. You’ve been coerced.” An abdication of personal responsibility via a false version of the political is surely, to borrow Jane’s sarcasm, a form of “perfect innocence,” too.
IF THESE CONTEMPORARY divorce narratives have an ur-text it’s surely Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling 2006 memoir Eat, Pray, Love, in which all life’s most gratifying experiences become possible only outside of and after marriage. As the exhortative title suggests, the narrator’s pursuit of post-divorce pleasure comes in large part through food. And why shouldn’t it! So many of us have been shamed for our appetites, or squandered time and energy fretting about our weight. Self-indulgence, however, can sham as self-discovery. Gilbert doesn’t so much experience Rome as consume it, via five flavors of gelato: “I tried a combination of the honey and the hazelnut. I came back later that same day for the grapefruit and the melon. Then, after dinner that same night, I walked all the way back over there one last time, just to sample a cup of the cinnamon-ginger.”
Similarly low-key onanistic scenes of delectation occur with striking frequency in the contemporary divorce narrative. “Sometimes,” the narrator confesses in Deborah Levy’s Real Estate, the third and final installment of an autobiographical trilogy that takes place after the end of a fifteen-year marriage, “I would sprinkle sea salt on a wedge of sour green tomato and dip it into the peppery emerald olive oil.” In Splinters, Leslie Jamison reflects on a hallowed moment soon after leaving her husband: “As dusk settled over its rustling trees, I drank a single perfect cappuccino in the velvet gloaming while my daughter cooed in her travel stroller.” And in A Life of One’s Own,recalling the new textures of her life after divorce, Joanna Biggs writes: “I would have lemon sorbet and champagne for dinner.” These moments are received as boasts of voluptuous, private feminine indulgence; as such, they come with the tenor of liberation.
I wonder, however, who was doing the oppression in the first place. Did these writers’ chimerical husbands sternly forbid the snacking on tomatoes dipped in olive oil, outlaw the partaking of single cappuccinos, or interdict the whimsy of sorbet and champagne for dinner? Did these twenty-first-century wives really need their husbands’ permission to eat whatever the fuck they wanted, whenever they wanted? Later, Biggs observes truthfully that “all these problems of living are never ending, which is to say that neither being married nor being single is the solution to them”—a tacit acknowledgment, perhaps, that sorbet for dinner is not emancipation per se, nor does marriage in the abstract preclude sorbet for dinner.
Mlotek asks the question: “Can an experience like divorce, and the decision to live not only through it but also beyond it, inspire not just a graceful ending but something actually new?” This echoes a sentiment implicit in A Life of One’s Own. Biggs considers nine women writers, with an emphasis on their romantic arrangements and rearrangements, since, as she explains: “I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others.” Toward the book’s end, she writes: “There are moments when I feel I am living out the promise of my own liberation, when I can look myself in the eye.”
A commitment to self-respect is unimpeachable. I wonder, though, if a more durable route toward such a goal might involve redirecting the gaze out into the world and toward others. Isn’t the work of becoming a person achieved less through the attention we pay ourselves and more via that we give to others? What would it mean to orient ourselves toward community, solidarity, and—if we can rescue this term from its associations with pussyhat-wearing apolitical nonsense (what was “the resistance”?!)—actual sisterhood? It’s a great irony that Audre Lorde, who gave us the term “self-care” and must be rolling in her grave at its corruptions (looking after yourself, she insisted, was a necessary girding to fight for justice—in other words, the opposite of preening retreat from the world), famously also wrote, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
Lorde’s politics insisted on heeding the realities of other people, on meeting their gaze. One salutary feature of voluntary partnership, state-recognized or not, is that it, too, pushes its participants to properly attend to the humanity of the other person. In her clear-eyed and sanguine work of philosophy and psychology, On Marriage, the British scholar Devorah Baum describes divorce as “a structure of possibility subsisting tacitly inside a marriage, alternately liberating and terrorizing.” That is to say, you can leave, but so can your partner; they could hurt you terribly, you could hurt them terribly, too. In this way—when and if it works—marriage militates against narcissism.
In Splinters, Jamison’s memoir of leaving her marriage and navigating motherhood, the most powerful moment occurs years before the relationship ends. Her husband is a widower, and Jamison is stepmother to his bereaved young daughter. Disillusioned with the marriage, she confides to a friend that she’s worried about the damage she might cause if she were to leave. The wise friend does not succumb to customary reassurance or empty validation. She simply tells Jamison, no doubt meeting her gaze as she does so, “You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause.” Unlike a photograph of a beautiful actress in a gesture of triumph, there’s nothing sexy or memeable about this. It’s just an answer from real life.
Hermione Hoby is the author of the novels Neon in Daylight (Catapult, 2018) and Virtue (Riverhead, 2021).