Why men can't write about divorce any more

Telegraph

03-04-2025

'Couples keep their secrets. Divorces have no such commitments,' writes Haley Mlotek in her critically acclaimed book, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce. As the daughter of a divorce counsellor, the 39-year-old Canadian (who ended her own marriage one year after saying I do and after 12 years with her ex partner) has learned that 'After a marriage ends there is sometimes what feels like a flood of information: there is no bottom to what a recently divorced person can remember and put into words… They could be speaking to assuage their guilt, or because they need somebody else to also condemn their former partner.'
Unpicking an author's motivation to publish is part of the voyeuristic allure of the divorce memoir: a genre that's been on the rise in recent years. In 2023 poet Maggie Smith unboxed the emotional fallout of her ex-husband's infidelity and inability to cope with her literary fame in You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir. Last year, Lyz Lenz pulled no punches in This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, which hit the shelves on the same day as essayist Leslie Jamison's Splinters, her account of leaving her novelist husband while their daughter was still an infant.
Sarah Manguso's 2024 novel Liars read like a memoir and, she has said, was fuelled by the rage she felt after her own marriage ended. As did Miranda July's All Fours (2024), in which July (who separated from her husband in 2022) described a 45-year-old woman swapping life's 'should do's' for her 'wants'. Spotting a trend Faber republished Ursula Parrott's then-scandalous 1929 memoir, Ex-Wife (in which she wrote with jazz age panache of feeling 'cold and dry like a Martini'), while Nora Ephron's 1989 novel Heartburn (routinely described as a 'thinly disguised' account of her divorce from journalist Carl Berstein) was rebooted as Virago Classic with a foreword from Stanley Tucci.
All these books are written by women. Early in This American Ex-Wife, Lenz points out that 70 per cent of divorces in the US are now initiated by women. In a recent interview she argued that 'there is an untapped vein of female anger in America that is roiling to the surface.' Mlotek tells me the trigger was the cultural shift brought on by MeToo movement in 2017, when women not only spoke up about sexual assault but laid bere the unequal emotional and physical labour that many women felt they were experiencing within their marriages.
The writer-heroine of Manguso's Liars is constantly listing all the household jobs she's ticked off while her man-child of a husband has achieved nothing more than a trip to the toilet, or taken the weekend off to focus on his unprofitable photographic art. In You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith writes: 'It's too late to do anything about the inequity in my now-kaput marriage. But I made the list of tasks anyway. I wanted to see in black and white what I'd been doing in the marriage. Reader, I was going to show you the list, but I decided against it. You don't need the list. Looking at it, I thought, No wonder so many divorced men get remarried right away and so many divorced women stay on their own.'
Although I never married the father of my two children, I was still very shocked when he suddenly walked out on me after living together for a decade. Our children were just one and four at the time so I wasn't able to get out for the usual drinks with friends that follow a break up. It was a lonely and confusing time in which – having to support my children by writing through the night – I had little time to collect and process my thoughts. I'd have appreciated the written companionship and analysis of these insightful, articulate women. My ex didn't explain his departure and I found myself asking a therapist what the men who visited her said about their own decisions to leave families. 'I'd love to tell you that!' she said. 'But those men don't seem to come to therapy. They don't really want to look back at what they've done.'
So what about the men writing divorce memoirs? Quite simply, there don't seem to be any. Novelist Amanda Craig suggests that's because 'they're either the guilty party or because they maintain the stuff upper lip.' Mlotek suspects they're also less inclined to want to work through the minutiae of relationships on the page. But she points to Daniel Oppenheimer's excellent essay in the New York Times earlier this month ('How I learned That The Problem in My Marriage Was Me') as an indication that we may be about to hear more from men on the subject. 'Maybe they're not writing books yet but the ideas are hanging out there…'
Fifty years ago, it was men who dominated the divorce genre, often pouring their own domestic woes in novelistic form as an act of retribution. John Updike wrote 18 short stories about a fictional couple Richard and Joan Maples (later collected and published as The Maples Stories) who divorced in mid-life. Most aspects of their lives mirrored those of Updike and his first wife, Mary Pennington (whom he divorced in 1974): they meet in college, have four children and battle on through infidelities on both sides before finally parting ways. The elegantly sardonic, suburban stories are all written from Richard Maple's perspective, so included cruel observations of Joan. 'In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly,' he notes. 'The skin between your breasts a sad yellow. I feast with the coffee on your drabness, every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge.'
Philip Roth (who died in 2018) was famously accused of pillorying his second wife, British actress Claire Bloom in his fiction. The couple married in 1986 and divorced in 1993 and the following year Bloom gave an unflattering portrait of vain and 'emotionally unavailable' Roth in her 1996 memoir Leaving A Doll's House. He responded by creating the manipulative, anti-Semitic character of Eve in a I Married a Communist (1998).
Nora Ephron noted that while reviewers always described her 1983 divorce novel Heartburn as 'thinly disguised' autobiography, the same words were never applied to male writers converting their own experiences into novels. 'Let's face it,' she wrote, 'Philip Roth and John Updike picked away at the carcasses of their early marriages in book after book, but to the best of my knowledge they were never hit with the thinly disguised thing.' This wasn't quite fair of Ephron, considering British novelist Linda Grant did call out the parallels between Roth and his own marriage. He responded: 'I write fiction, and I'm told it's autobiography. I write autobiography and I'm told it's fiction, so since I'm so dim and they're so smart, let them decide.'
There does seem to be, however, a snobbery reserved for the memoir over the novel. Yet the great poet and memoirist Mary Karr famously said that 'Divorce writing may be the toughest thing a memoirist can do other than covering a war'. Leslie Jamison – author of the best selling essay collection The Empathy Exams who teaches memoir writing at Columbia – tells me that she often shares with her students a piece of advice she got from Karr: 'You don't evoke the pain of divorce by writing everything painful and ugly about the divorce itself, but by conjuring the depth and texture of the love that came before.'
While this divorce memoir trend seems to be fizzing away in the US, there's not been a major divorce memoir published in the UK since Rachel Cusk's 2012 book, Aftermath. That book – in which Cusk described losing respect for her husband after he quit his job as a successful lawyer to look after their children while she wrote – saw its author widely condemned as 'wilfully, selfishly naive'. Debbie Taylor – founder of Mslexia magazine which runs memoir writing courses and publishes essays by women – suspects British readers are 'a bit more relaxed about the whole issue' than our more socially conservative friends across the pond.
'What I do observe about this current round of divorce memoirs,' says Mlotek, 'is that they're less 'self-helpy' than they were [when books such as Elizabeth Gilbert's 2006 bestseller Eat Pray Love were being published]. Those were rooted in the idea of: 'What am I going to do? What does this say about me?' People making, maybe unwittingly, a spectacle of something that hurts.' She thinks that she and her peers are looking more at divorce in the context 'of culture and community'. Her own book explores the way we all 'perform' our relationships for the public – whether in the ceremonies of old or on social media where she jokes 'when I see a couple posting a lot about their relationship I do catch myself thinking: 'oh no, something's wrong there.''
What Mlotek finds funny is 'the assumption that women who write about their divorces all hate marriage when the one thing we have in common is that we all got married! ' Would she marry again? Mlotek laughs. 'Depends who's asking!'