When I think of the canonical divorce novel, two polar opposites come to mind: the primal scream that is Elena Ferrante’s 2002 The Days of Abandonment, published in Italy years before her famous Neapolitan novels, and, very much on the other end of the spectrum, Nora Ephron’s 1983 Heartburn, which is a laugh-out-loud funny account (with recipes!) of, legend goes, Ephron’s own divorce from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. Recently it seems there’s been an uptick in divorce novels and memoirs, likely because we are the first generation to come of age in the time of no-fault divorce, which only became legal in all 50 states in 2010. It follows that we’d be writing about it.
I have to admit, I never thought I would get divorced, let alone write a novel about a divorce. But after 15 years of marriage, there I was, moving out into my own apartment, newly single… right before the beginning of a certain global pandemic you might recall. It was a terrible situation and also a terribly interesting one: I felt like I had so much perspective and clarity, suddenly, about marriage, relationships, the patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and desire. I took notes, especially once I started dating for the first time, and soon an idea for a novel popped into my head: What if, rather than choosing from the actual people who are available on, say, the dating apps, there was an app that could create your ideal person from bits and pieces of others? My novel’s protagonist Rachel became an app developer, and the novel was off and running.
Something I found interesting was that once my novel Animal Instinct was finished, but before it was published, it seemed like there was suddenly a stream of new divorce memoirs and novels: Kelly McMasters’ thoughtful The Leaving Season, Maggie Smith’s beloved You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and Sarah Manguso’s ferocious Liars to name just a few; along with divorce-adjacent books about women rediscovering their desire in midlife, like Miranda July’s All Fours. It’s rather beautiful to realize that, during a time when I felt alone and maybe a little crazy, there were all these other women out there feeling the same way. Isn’t that one of the foundational joys of reading, after all? – When someone articulates a feeling you thought only you had?
Here are seven novels that each made me think about divorce—and life—a little differently.
Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott
Funny to think of it now, but before divorce was as common as it is today, there wasn’t an easy shorthand for someone who has been divorced. Ursula Parrott’s 1929 novel Ex-Wife (so scandalous it was originally published anonymously) is often credited with popularizing the term “ex-wife.” The book, full of startlingly contemporary insights, opens with the narrator getting ready for a cocktail party, and her friend sharing a sort of taxonomy of ex-wives: “Not every woman who used to be married is one…You’re an ex-wife, Pat, because it is the most important thing to know about you.” By her theory, women who move on easily or fall in love again soon, are no longer primarily “ex-wives.” Pat, the narrator, agrees: “An ex-wife’s a woman who’s always prattling at parties about the joy of being independent, while she’s sober… and beginning on either the virtues or the villianies of her departed husband on one drink too many.” It’s an evergreen truth that there are different stages of being post-marriage, and this Jazz Age novel dives right into the first painful, exciting, scary, liberating, sexy, lonely, confusing, exhilarating years right after the protagonist’s divorce.
The Divorcées by Rowan Beaird
This lushly-written novel breathes life into the fun fact that liberated women love: Up until the 1970s, when other states began to relax their divorce laws, Reno, Nevada was known as the Divorce Capital of the World. You just had to establish residency there for at least 6 weeks and then chose one of some set grounds for divorce—as opposed to almost everywhere else, where one had to prove adultery or abuse in order to end a marriage. This led to a cottage industry for ranches and boarding houses where women seeking divorce could stay, in a time when many “respectable,” middle-class women would likely have never lived on their own. Rowan Beaird’s atmospheric novel The Divorcées follows one of these women: Lois, who is in her early twenties, and has been relatively privileged and sheltered, going directly from her father’s house to her husband’s house. Her time at a luxury divorce ranch in Reno becomes more than a waiting period—she starts to get to know herself in a whole new way. A vivid, sun-baked setting plus unforgettable characters plus the revolutionary idea that a woman like Lois might want to end a marriage simply because she doesn’t feel seen and respected by her soulless husband? Yes, please.
The Not Wives by Carley Moore
So many of the great divorce novels ask the question, What if divorce isn’t the end, but the beginning? This is the thrust of The Not-Wives, a wild, sexy, queer book about restarting and revolution. Set against the backdrop of Occupy-era NYC, this poetic novel tells the story of three women who are decidedly Not Wives—one bisexual woman who is looking for love and hoping to start a family (while being constantly sexually harrassed by men she works with); one young unhoused woman who needs to wrench free of her addict partner; and one queer mother who is still getting her footing after a recent divorce. Liberated sex lives are intertwined with political resistance here; the book opens, “Perhaps fucking was a road map for those of us who no longer believed in directions.” Each of these women is looking for new road maps, paths that don’t necessarily hew to the white-picket-fence-heterosexual-nuclear-family blueprint we’re all meant to desire. As the divorced mother says: “I used to think my job was to stay whole, to keep it all humming along like the vaudeville act with the spinning plates, every plate just about to fall and break, but still miraculously whirling. But I was wrong, my job was to let the plates crash and shatter. My job was to fall apart spectacularly, and then to make a new self out of fragments.”
Seven Days in June by Tia Williams
This charming, hilarious romance isn’t often presented as a divorce novel, but the protagonist is a single mother who has been divorced, and her baggage from the way that marriage ended informs her largely-nonexistant romantic life. This book takes place long after Eva’s divorce-dust has settled and she’s been decidedly single for years, focusing on establishing her writing career and raising her sassy tween daughter, who only sees her father during the summers. Eva also struggles with chronic migraines, which led to the dissolution of her marriage (“I wanted a wife,” her husband weeps, “not a patient”). When we meet Eva, she’s about to embark on lusty reunion with a long-lost love, and without giving too much away, rest assured it’s a deeply satisfying read for any divorced person who has ever worried that they might be “too much,” or that their past hurts and present needs make them unloveable. I’m all for portraits of women in midlife, especially mothers, reclaiming their desire after divorce – and this is a particularly fun (and steamy) one.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Another book that’s not exactly a divorce novel, per se – but is both about perhaps the messiest breakup of all times, and has my favorite book dedication ever: “To divorced cis women, who, like me, had to face starting their life over without either reinvesting in the illusions from the past, or growing bitter about the future.” (Why, thank you!) Detransition, Baby is about two complicated characters who have recently broken up: Reese and Amy, who are both trans women—until, that is, Amy detransitions, having found life as a trans woman simply too complicated, becoming Ames instead and living as a cis man. Both Reese and Ames struggle to find equilibrium after this dramatic shift. Reese dives into risky sex with unavailable people (a classic post-divorce coping mechanism, really), while Ames finds himself sleeping with his boss, a divorced woman named Katrina, who he accidentally gets pregnant. Since Reese had always talked about wanting a family, Ames wonders if the three of them can work something out all together—after all, they’re modern people, aren’t they? In one unforgettable scene, the three of them are talking (at the GLAAD Awards gala, of all settings), and Reese says to Katrina, “Divorce is a transition story… since I don’t really have any trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.” Reese, Katrina, and Ames all have things to teach each other, and a shared urge to find new ways to shape relationships and families – like so many people who emerge from divorce feeling cynical about the exisiting systems.
The Divorce by César Aira
Believe it or not, some divorce stories are told by men (!). This inventive book, originally published in Argentina and recently translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, features a recently divorced man, Kent, spending Christmas in Buenos Aires. There is something uniquely unsettling about those first post-marriage holidays, which might account for the odd feel of the novel, and for Kent’s openness to strange and magical synchronicities. Kent is sitting at a cafe when, through a series of commonplace-yet-curious events, he encounters a cyclist who it turns out he not only knows, but whose life has been interwoven with Kent’s in numerous, numinous ways. Coincidences lead to near infinite digressions, like the spokes of a spinning wheel. In one surreal scene, characters have to escape a labyrinthine burning building via a scale model that shrinks their own dimensions to a sub-atomic scale. It’s described as a “microcatastrophe within the microcatastrophe,” a phrase that seems to me like it could be just as accurately applied to the labyrinth of divorce. Throughout this slim, strange book, the dislocated world it describes feels very much to me like that raw time right after a marriage has ended.
Hot Air by Marcy Dermansky
There is nothing like the funny frankness of a Marcy Dermansky novel, in which absurd circumstances tend to befall the most complex and yet oddly relatable women. I considered highlighting The Red Car here, Dermansky’s 2016 book about an unhappily married woman on the run in a cursed red car haunted by her dead boss (obviously), of which the author has said, “I think I was writing a case for divorce with this book.” But the prolific Dermansky has a new addition to the divorce novel canon with Hot Air, which opens with the divorced protagonist going on her first date in seven years: “Joannie was not certain how the date was going… She had never been on a proper date with her ex-husband even before they were married. He had just sort of worn her down, so clearly in love with her. And that was a big chunk of her life. Her marriage. Years and years of her life. Stolen.” The first date in question is interrupted by, you guessed it, a hot air balloon piloted by a squabbling married couple crashing into a swimming pool. (What, you didn’t guess that?) Joanie’s introduction to her post-divorce desire is thus defined by an unexpected adventure she embarks on with these unhappy billionaires – and Cesar Aira-level coincidences, as the husband turns out to be the person Joanie had her first kiss with back at summer camp as a child. Proof that life after divorce can be very, very surprising.
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