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Since 2023, there has been a renaissance of memoirs and autofiction about divorced women written by divorced women. Publishing would have us believe that there is an insatiable market for these stories, and so titles have been churned out in rapid succession. We have been given a traditional divorce memoir in Splinters by Leslie Jamison, a buzzy new memoir in No Fault by Haley Mlotek, a craft book as personal narrative in You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith, a memoir mired with reportage in This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz, and thinly veiled autofiction in Liars by Sarah Manguso.

On the surface, this rise of divorce literature seems like something we should all obviously be supporting. It’s baked into the politics of basic human decency. Other examples of things we should all do might include supporting a woman’s right to bodily autonomy, to have a credit card, or to vote. Basic stuff, right? In fact, my politics go even further. I don’t just support women’s rights, but also women's wrongs. I love a female anti-hero; my favorite romance is Gone Girl. I even started a professional book club specifically dedicated to reading “good for her” literature. You know, plots where a woman blows up her life, is unapologetically cunty, and marches to her own beat of the drum. I’m all for it.

So why does this recent onslaught of divorce literature get the bile rising in the back of my throat?

I got divorced.

You might think, girl, isn’t this YOUR tribe? Your hatred of divorce literature must obviously be based in feelings of shame! Maybe you are feeling too clearly seen in these stories that reflect your heartbreak back to you. Or maybe you are jealous, because you are also a writer, but these women made their heartbreak monetizable and artistic?

I want to love this sub-genre of literature, I promise. I keep reaching to the shelves like Oliver Twist, begging, “Please sir, let this book be the one that makes me feel whole again?” And every single one has let me down.

And I have a theory why.

I think divorce literature is not actually for women, and certainly not at all for divorced women. Look at who is doing the writing. By and large, it’s an army of unrelatable, privileged white ladies who make a livable wage as writers. The premise of their books is how appalled they are that they could be so let down by a relationship. Their divorce books become a private echo chamber where they can take back the narrative. In their story, these women’s only fault is that they believed in the power of love and family a little too much. And the end of these books is where they use their own pen to re-christen themselves as powerful, brave and honest beacons of feminism. And their resulting story be heard and honored because they had a hard time.

Let me tell you something: Getting divorced in and of itself does not make you a hero, a good person, or even interesting. How I wish that getting divorced was a laudable act of defiance against the oppression of patriarchy, one that also conveniently happens to do work for the advancement of marginalized groups of people. Alas, popular media reminds us that it’s mostly useful as a rebranding exercise, once that paints this cohort of divorcées as daringly defiant divas whose simple act of breaking their vows shot them into a tier of anointed womanhood where they become the enviable torch-bearers of feminine rage, individuality, and autonomy.

One book that rubbed me particularly wrong was Sarah Manguso’s Liars. It’s framed as an archetypal fable of Every Failed Marriage™. The fact that a middle-class white woman would dare tout the story of her divorce as the universal story of every marriage is appallingly harmful. What a way to avoid accountability for the kind of privilege that allowed you to get divorced without any serious changes to your quality of life. And yes, the premise of the book is that everyone lies in their relationship, but while the husband John is touted as an abusive adulterer, Jane’s lies amount to uh, telling herself that she was happy. After all, Jane is a virtuous woman: the template of a good wife, someone obviously too good and too smart for her husband. Thus it is a shock when her husband leaves her for another woman. It’s an airtight novel, with no room for us to interrogate the protagonist’s motives or reliability. That’s what this book wants: for Jane to always be right, so we can feel extra bad for her when she is left anyway. To be a scorned woman does not mean you are correct about every feeling, but that wouldn’t make for a neat narrative, now would it?

I’m sure there are a few actually good divorce books out there, but as a category, this is a genre of trainwrecks moralizing as the one most done wrong — and pretending that their own experience with one single man (and it is usually a man!) imbues them with some kind of advanced-level hetero sagacity. These authors say they want us to “learn” from their mistakes, but really, they want us to witness their transformation from damsel in distress to hero, and then simultaneously pity them while also idolizing their transcendence.

I wish I could say that for me, the tumult of my divorce was ostensibly the trial by fire that set me free, and that my life became peachy keen after. But nah. What every divorce memoir does get right is the fact that yes, getting divorced is hell. It was a wrenching period of my life, where every decision I’d ever made, and every insecurity was exposed. It was like my own psychological make-up was handed to me on a platter, and the residue was ugly. So maybe that’s what the divorce lit genre (and its writers) needs: Permission to be ugly, sucky, and possibly…to stay unwritten.

—Laura Limpus

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