The Trouble with Divorce Memoir Feminism

Is Substack's feminist cause de jour really that helpful to women or feminism?

Let me start out by saying, I’ve got nothing against divorce. I think it’s the right move for many women, many people, for that matter. Not everyone is meant to be monogamous their entire life.

My parents are divorced. I myself am married, relatively happily and have been for 10 years. But honestly who knows what will happen in the future.

Nevertheless, I hope we can make it. Divorce can be difficult. My parents I think still beat themselves up over what happened. But I don’t blame them. Even if everyone in a marriage is committed, even if nothing super tragic happens, it’s still difficult to hold it together sometimes.

There’s a lot of chatter on Feminist Substack rn about divorce. Liz Lynz started it off by writing this triumphant memoir about how she left her husband. He sounds like a jerk just from passing things I’ve heard (I didn’t read it fwiw), but I’m also not a huge Liz Lenz devotee tbh. Also Maggie Smith, a poet from Columbus, where I’m from, wrote a divorce memoir, and that one I did read.

I love memoirs. And as a married person and also a person who’s into dark stuff, I’m sorta interested in divorce. I went out of my way to buy her book. But I have to say, I wasn’t a big fan.

If I’m reading a memoir, and I really like that genre, one thing is: the story itself has to be super compelling AND it has to be well written. People are having a wild range of experiences in the world. And there are a million books I could read. In Maggie Smith’s case, her husband cheats on her and they split up. At the time they have young kids.

This is obviously a terrible thing to go through, and maybe if I had been divorced I would have found it comforting or whatever. It sorta seemed like she tried to dramatize the whole thing with really flowery writing. But I don’t think she quite succeeded (on the other hand, I DID actually really like the divorce memoir Aftermath by British writer Rachel Cusk, which pretty much did the same thing but somehow I feel like it worked better.)

Around the same time I read Maggie Smith’s book, I read this other memoir, Shook One, it was called, by the media personality Charlamange tha God (Lenard Larry McKelvey). McKelvey’s book, it’s about how he has anxiety, and partly that’s the result of living as a black man in America. It was kind of wild, the contrast between the two, even tho both writers had achieved kind of unexpected fame in communications related roles, which was part of the narrative arc and why they got a book deal in the first place.

McKelvey though grew up poor. In one part, he talks about how he sold crack for a little while while he was living with his family as a teenager in a trailer in the rural south. But he just mentioned it kinda offhand, it wasn’t even a big focus in the book.

By contrast, Maggie Smith is living this dream life. Goes to college, gets an MFA (big red flag for me if a memoir mentions an MFA), has this poem go viral, moves to this wealthy suburb. And then finds out her husband is cheating on her and gets a divorce.

Now, as someone who works, at least tangentially in the writing field, or has, I kinda get the impulse to parlay your divorce into a book deal. I also feel like women writers also are kind of pressured to write revealing pieces about their personal lives, in a way that’s kind of unethical by the media/publishing, and then harshly judged for doing so. That’s not my intent here. And Maggie Smith, I’m being too hard on, didn’t even really choose divorce, it was thrust on her.

Anyway, on Substack, a lot of this has morphed into this discussion about whether women really benefit from marriage at all. Most divorces, 70%, are initiated by women. Women are happier after they get divorced, they will say, have less housework etc. people argue. I know women for whom that is true and that blows my mind.

So I don’t mean to be too dismissive about all this. I think there is a real frustration on the part of many married women my age (I’m about 40) about the lack of equality in domestic labor. Especially as women make more money, they’re not always going to be willing to do ALL the childcare and housework as well. And married men might take advantage of them. Men need to step up and be real partners, and some of them don’t seem to have it in them. They aren’t necessarily going to get to behave the way their fathers did.

That being said, I have a hard time relating to this discourse. Especially when it becomes anti marriage altogether. Is that becoming the feminist position? Or is that just the kind of edge lording writers do to drum up clicks? Is there even any distinction anymore?

I feel like marriage, in its best sense, can still be an equal partnership. Not every woman is a type-A over achiever that is killing it at work and managing everything in her household. My husband is neater than me by nature, and maybe that’s the secret to achieving domestic equality. (I kid). Right now he’s doing a home improvement project while I fiddle with this dumb essay.

A lot of these divorce memoir feminists, Liz Lenz, for eg, are successful media professionals. In the world of women, this is sorta like being a rock star. Many, many influential feminists are this kind of woman. But they are not representative of the average American woman at all.

This chart from the Pew Research Center really stuck with me. Look at the wealth gap between married women (really households) with children and single moms. Even if we divide the marital assets evenly in those married households, married women with kids have 18 times the wealth of single moms.

Meanwhile, in other corners of the internet, there’s this whole dialogue about college-educated Americans are really breaking away from those with less education on wealth. And part of that is due to the fact that college-educated people are so much more likely to get married and stay married, which is helpful to wealth accumulation for straightforward (sharing housing costs) and arguably unfair reasons (tax advantages). And that is something the divorce memoirs don’t really grapple with usually: How marriage is sorta becoming this well-to-do privilege at the same time certain voices are loudly rejecting it.

It’s a little reminiscent of the cluelessness on class/social issues that I think was so costly to Democrats this cycle I’m afraid.