The Divorce Plot
Sometimes this thing happens where you get a flurry of similar books around the same time. This year we've had Lyz Lenz's This American Ex-Wife, Leslie Jamison's Splinters, and now Sarah Manguso's Liars all within just a few months and it feels like a divorce story trend.
There are differences, certainly. They don't have anywhere near the same structure or style. Lenz is much more concerned with the wider societal story, and bases it in her own Midwestern Evangelical experience. Two are nonfiction, but Liars is nominally fiction (though Manguso's previous novel was heavily autobiographical and most of her work is nonfiction, including memoir).
Maybe you are a normal person who doesn't want to read three entire books about bad marriages that end in divorce but maybe you are me and you want to read all of them. But if you are a normal person and only want to read one, well, lucky for you there is a clear winner in all of this and that winner is Liars. That is why you are getting this newsletter in July even though I am writing it in May, having just read Liars, which comes out July 23rd. It would have been cruel of me to send it and then make you wait so long. Liars is yet another book to add to my list of read in less than a day. In this case, less than 12 hours. Would have been one sitting if I hadn't started it at 10pm and wanted to be awake enough to enjoy it.
Lenz's book is perfectly fine, though it feels like entry-level stuff for me. Though, let's be fair, I've been divorced for more than ten years so it's all old hat to me now. It will probably be really helpful for a lot of people who came into marriage not thinking of it as a broken, patriarchal institution. It will be great for a lot of freshly divorced women who are trying to figure out what to do now. So if that is you, then yes, here is your book. Lenz is a very friendly and thoughtful narrator who will make you feel seen.
Jamison's memoir is, well, maybe fine I guess. I did not realize there was a cult of Leslie Jamison until just before this book came out when they started getting all hyped.
The first thing you need to know about this book is that it is not about marriage or divorce! You are being sold a false bill of goods! This is a book about motherhood.
To be clear, all three of these books have a lot about motherhood. All three of them have relatively privileged white women with children who go through a divorce that challenges their identities as mothers as much or more than their identity as wives. But Jamison's novel is SO much about motherhood. My youngest was about the same age as Jamison's child when I got divorced and you'd think this would give me a lot to relate to in this book but I honestly couldn't! This was a book about a mother obsessed with her child, clinging to her child, unable to leave her child. It is about motherhood as coping mechanism when your life is falling apart. And for me, that is not how it all played out. Quite the opposite. I had been so immersed in motherhood that, for me, divorce was a reclamation and rediscovery of self that was very invigorating. (Lenz focuses on this a lot, one of the pros of her book.) But pitching this as a book about divorce is not great.
Also it's just... not that good. I see why we have a cult of Jamison. She can write some very excellent sentences. But this book was BORING. The thing about divorce is that it can be very dramatic internally but to everyone else it can be not at all interesting. There is just not that much to enjoy here, really.
On paper, Liars and Splinters are very similar. Told in short pieces, almost more anecdotes than plot. Both writers create immaculate, poignant sentences that hit you right in the heart. Both are about the marriage of two artists where one of the major problems is that each one's success is a threat to the other. Actually let's be precise: that the wife's success is a threat to the husband. When you read both you are very tempted to google "author's name + husband" to see who the man is who has been so effectively exposed and destroyed publicly. (Yes, clearly I did. Hope their new girlfriends can't google.)
But the two books are, in my opinion, a world apart. Liars is the book that made me remember the person I was when I was in the last years of a deteriorating marriage. It was the book that made me remember the moments during divorce where I came completely unraveled. It was the one that felt real.
Many readers will give up on this book in frustration, I'm sure. They will wonder, how does she stay? And they will wonder it again every few pages until they can no longer tolerate it. But there is a simple answer to this: staying in a bad marriage requires a kind of madness. And that is so much of what Manguso manages here, to capture that madness on the page.
Staying in a bad relationship is an irrational act masquerading as a rational one. It puts you in a frame of mind where the truth is actively avoided, where you can only accept these other secondary problems, problems that are not worth leaving over, problems that will get better if you can just put in the work. Leaving is not even on the table, the relationship must continue, this is unquestioned. I have heard many friends describe bad relationships they left and wondered openly how they could stay as long as they did. They tell you how long they were unhappy. They tell you how long it was since they had sex. It seems impossible that they didn't just call it off much earlier! I know it was the same for me. But there is no explanation. It never makes sense, and that is why Liars feels so true even if it makes you feel like the protagonist may have lost touch with reality completely.
One thing all three of these books do well is that while they have plenty of incriminating evidence against husbands, they do not go easy on themselves as wives. They all portray the weaknesses and outbursts and mental health struggles of being a wife. It is certainly hard to read any one of them, not to mention all three, and still believe in marriage as a good institution.
The moral of all of them is the moral I took from my own marriage and divorce. The idea that if you marry a good man, a man with feminist principles, an artist, etc., that does not guarantee you anything better than the generations of women who came before you. That you cannot as a couple simply rise above the institution. That men do not always understand and recognize their own need and desire for patriarchy, and that they definitely will not accept that you are right when you call it out. That you cannot just have a good marriage simply because you are a modern woman. It may feel like you can, after all how could it be any other way for someone who is smart and self-aware, well-educated, capable of supporting herself, successful, etc.? But none of these things will save you.
There is plenty that's missing from these stories. All three of these women are writers, a career that is certainly precarious but one that also allows them a kind of flexibility that was nothing like my experience. All three of these women are white and straight and not experiencing abuse and while extricating themselves is hard and financially difficult, they seem to do just fine actually. But, well, that's also a lot of what we've been getting in writing about motherhood, which has grown a lot in the last ten years. There is a lot more space here and a need for a many more voices, hopefully this is just the beginning. We have a good 75 years of men writing about the confines of marriage to push back against, a lot of ground to make up.
(There is actually one more memoir about marriage out this month called The Widow's Guide to Dead Bastards but I did not like it at all, even less than Splinters so we are just going to ignore it.)
And now for July releases!
So many books claim to be "dark comedies" and/or "satire" that are actually neither so it is a relief to read one that actually is! A better version of American Fiction. (Sorry but the novel Erasure the film is based on is over 20 years old and while I liked the movie, the satire of it is not actually very relevant to the present where Black authors are writing a whole lot of the most interesting stuff out there about a wide variety of Black experiences and if I keep going I will get a whole other newsletter out of it.) This is quite of the moment, about the difficulties of being an artist for a living, about the drive to succeed or sell out, about the dangers of the aspirational. It is really sharp and also fun to read, great combination.
Another book about marriage, this one a novella. This book does so much in less than 150 pages, it makes you wonder why anyone would need double that. Gives you the whole story of a marriage in the 50's centered on a housewife who one day gets in the pool and won't get out. Lots of little reveals and secrets, and yet somehow optimistic.
Earlier this year I read a (very bad) book that wanted so much to be an old school Steven King novel about a group of childhood friends who reunite to defeat an evil they thought they'd already defeated. I read the whole (very long) thing hoping it would turn it around because there is something very satisfying about this particular kind of book. You just want to curl up with it for a whole weekend and get lost in it. Especially since you can't really go back and reread IT without bailing before the terrible ending (or skipping a big chunk of it).
This sure seems to be the kind of book Shaun Hamill wanted to write here but he actually succeeds. These days I tend to end up in fantasy only when it's mashed up with something else, like it is here with horror. But Hamill is great at the worldbuilding, doesn't spend tons of time explaining and keeps the plot moving. I don't want to get all bogged down in the intricate details and neither does Hamill. Some things are never fully understood, sometimes you have to just suspend your disbelief, and that is honestly just fine with me.
Particularly solid character work, better than you'd expect from a book of this little subgenre, and also a nice step up from Hamill's debut, A Cosmology of Monsters. Great multi-timeline and multi-POV work, also things I love but which a lot of people mess up.
That does it for July! I have one more release actually but I'll be writing about it and a few other titles next month. There have been a lot of summer books, especially thrillers, that I just did not like so this is a shorter list than I'd like. (Hated the new Ruth Ware. Hated the new Catherine Steadman. And there are plenty more that I didn't even finish because I just did not enjoy them at all.) I don't exactly have a bunch of great beach picks this year but when I went to the beach last week I brought Ferrante so who am I to give beach read recommendations?