Divorce is within the literary air currently. Maggie Smith, whose poem “Good Bones” went viral in 2016, launched a memoir final 12 months about getting divorced after her husband couldn’t take her success; the nonfiction author Leslie Jamison’s new e-book, Splinters, is about splitting up together with her husband not lengthy after their daughter was born; Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel, Ex-Spouse, was reissued final spring to a heat reception.
It isn’t a shock, then, to come across a brand new launch—This American Ex-Spouse, by the journalist Lyz Lenz—that approaches divorce in a method that has all however taken over standard nonfiction directed at primarily feminine audiences: a light-weight mixture of historical past and social commentary that leans closely on private storytelling with out fairly turning into memoir. Frequent although it’s, this hybrid kind is hard to drag off. It may possibly tempt writers to map their very own experiences too neatly onto collective ones whereas additionally undermining the specificity and perspective {that a} good memoir wants. This American Ex-Spouse suffers from each of those issues. Lenz’s impulse to generalize is so sturdy that at instances her work whiffs of self-help.
Lenz, a former newspaper columnist and standard Substack author who revealed two books earlier than this one, acquired divorced in 2017, after 12 years of marriage to a person who seems in This American Ex-Spouse as a petty, controlling jerk. Being with him, Lenz writes, took away her “whole sense of self.” When she describes their relationship, her prose is alive with anguish; when she describes leaving, it sparks with pleasure. However she not often writes on this mode for lengthy. Virtually with out exception, her private tales give method to exhortations to readers, addressed alternately as “we” and “you,” to free themselves (ourselves?) from the “pyre of human marriage.” Typically, Lenz does that by shifting into the cheerleading stance of a TED Talker onstage. “I wish to let you know,” she writes early within the e-book, “that breaking is our energy. I wish to let you know that strolling away is a energy. I wish to let you know that there’s energy in giving up.”
Such prose is undeniably attention-grabbing, a wake-up name in literary kind. It’s plainly supposed to be inspirational—and, certainly, This American Ex-Spouse makes use of the story of Lenz’s marriage ending, alongside statistics and interviews and a startling quantity of country-music criticism, to argue that straight marriage is a collapsing edifice, a “failed utopia” and “violent jail” that ladies ought to abandon. Lenz is right that marriage is riddled with issues. It has historic roots in a system that subsumed ladies’s property and authorized identification. She notes that enslaved {couples} tended to be excluded from the protections of marriage, and that homosexual marriage turned authorized nationwide solely in 2015. Many individuals are nonetheless, as she writes, “pressured out of the heterosexual marriage market” right now, although Lenz’s arguments on this entrance (she claims in passing that society has thought of some individuals “too fats or too skinny” to get married, as an illustration) are so sweeping as to veer into the offensive. Lenz refers to sociological research demonstrating that married males are happier and extra profitable than their single counterparts; the labor economist Claudia Goldin gained the 2023 Nobel Prize partly for her work exhibiting that the gender pay hole right now will be attributed to the uneven break up in family labor between women and men, particularly after they’ve kids.
However historical past exhibits the world because it was, social science as it’s. It’s on the remainder of us to think about the world because it may very well be. On the web page, at the very least, Lenz by no means entertains the concept that marriage might change for the higher. Nor does she think about a radical different—say, a society during which marriage doesn’t exist. As an alternative, she turns, again and again, to particular person ladies’s selections to depart their marriage, which she invariably presents as a courageous, crucial, and—sure—inspirational alternative. Early within the e-book, Lenz writes archly, “I’m not arguing that you simply personally ought to break up. I imply, not essentially.” She then goes on to recommend, repeatedly, that it is best to.
Halfway by way of This American Ex-Spouse, Lenz recollects discussing the difficulties of marriage with an unnamed girl who requested to not be put within the e-book. “I didn’t promise something,” Lenz tells the reader, a contact smugly. Elsewhere, she describes a second with a lady who mentions wanting a divorce after which tells Lenz to neglect what she stated. “I squeeze her hand,” Lenz writes, “and I refuse to neglect.” Taken collectively, these moments display her conviction that it’s her function to bear public witness to ladies’s marital struggling. She additionally appears satisfied that every one ladies married to males should endure. Such dramatic certainty creates a wide range of insensitivities, as complete confidence tends to. At one level, Lenz writes that marriage “is how ladies are disappeared,” a jarring alternative on condition that, up to now 60 years, the phrase to be disappeared has most frequently referred to dissident victims of far-right regimes. Elsewhere, she tells the reader that “nobody actually is aware of lonely higher than a married girl sitting subsequent to her silent husband”—a declare an unhappily married girl may agree with, and one that may make a grieving widow, or a lady with an incarcerated associate, throw the e-book throughout the room.
Unshakable confidence is a key characteristic of self-help. Writers in that style telegraph authority whereas additionally demonstrating the reassurance readers hope to domesticate for themselves. Some do that by way of bossiness (see the influencer Rachel Hollis’s Lady, Wash Your Face), some by way of experience (see the intercourse therapist Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity). Lenz dips into each modes, which obstructs her capability to entry the intimacy and vulnerability that make memoirs work—and, typically, make them inspiring. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, a large greatest vendor that has motivated some readers to alter their lives and others to hike the Pacific Crest Path, is explicitly about overcoming worry and grief, however Strayed doesn’t recommend that the strategies that helped her will assist others; she delves into her personal life with out extrapolating, permitting readers to really feel her transformation alongside her. Lenz, in distinction, habitually shifts from private modes of writing to emphatic solutions that readers observe her lead.
One other conspicuous ingredient of This American Ex-Spouse is its give attention to particular person reinvention. In the midst of a chapter that treats the doomed renovation of the home she and her husband purchased collectively as a metaphor for each their marriage and the establishment at massive, Lenz writes that “fixing one thing restores what’s outdated. It’s a conservative effort.” Plainly, her marriage couldn’t be rehabilitated. However Lenz’s tendency to conflate her relationship with all straight relationships means she offers brief shrift to the social repairs that may help gender fairness within the dwelling and make marriage extra of a freely chosen choice and fewer of a factor individuals do to get medical insurance. Baby-care burdens are a significant motive ladies depart the workforce; housekeeping, labor historically accomplished by ladies, is undervalued and infrequently unremunerated. Fixing these issues would have a substantial impression on modern American marriage, however addressing them is much from Lenz’s essential focus. It’s tough to inform whether or not this can be a matter of impatience—she desires change now, at a pace that largely works solely on the particular person stage—or a elementary perception that marriage is immutable as a result of males are.
Though This American Ex-Spouse incorporates candy cameos by male buddies who encourage Lenz to place her personal happiness first, its most substantial male perspective is that of the refrain of offended males who touch upon and reply to Lenz’s work on-line. Being harassed by web misogynists is a depressing expertise, one which Lenz, whose e-newsletter known as Males Yell at Me, has reclaimed as a private model. In a current interview, Lenz talked about wanting to place males “on blast and on discover” together with her e-book. Even when that’s the case, she exhibits remarkably little persistence for divorced ladies who hope to get married once more. As an alternative of creating house for complexity, Lenz seems to coach her eyes on the set vacation spot of a repaired life. For her, this restore means being single. A “higher factor [than marriage] did exist,” she writes, “and it was me.”
That concept could also be compelling, however it gives little hope for the reader who may need an egalitarian marriage for themselves or for these they love—one which uplifts and protects women and men alike. It’s fantastic that Lenz acquired her sense of self again from a relationship that destroyed it. However by turning her story into an archetype, she omits the nuance that may have made it resonate.
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