15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
If the marriage plot is an ailment, is the divorce plot the cure?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a newly divorced woman in possession of literary talents must be in want of a book contract.
The past year has yielded a barrage of autobiographical meditations on divorce. February 2024 brought two best-selling memoirs, the journalist Lyz Lenz's crudely polemical 'This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life' and the essayist Leslie Jamison's soggily uplifting 'Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story.' Next came 'All Fours,' a gorgeous riot of a novel by the artist and writer Miranda July, and 'Liars,' a sleek and irradiatingly angry fiction in fragments by the poet and novelist Sarah Manguso. As a rule, these books had similar structures. They all began with a strained marriage, hurtled toward a rupture or a reconfiguration, and ended when their female narrators gained a new sense of serenity.
