Everyones writing about the end of their marriage, for better or worse.
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(Which literary man will dare write the great ex-husband memoir?)
GiveMetheGoodStuff
Primal-scream-style memoirs that contain all the petty details about long-held resentments and infidelity.
I want to tell as much of the truth as I can, she writes.
Telling the truth is often a demolition project.
Even a decent marriage drains the life out of a woman, the narrator writes.
It really is absolute shit, being a mans wife.
A memoir was inevitable.
Its strangely heartwarming to realize that even sexagenarians can be this chaotic.
July 15, 2025; Henry Holt and Co.
Soon enough, she was throwing it all away for the sisterhood.
As a nun-curious teenager, I didnt know any married people who were happy, she writes.
I was a logical, common-sense kid, and to me, marriage looked like a scam.
February 18, 2025; Viking
A cool appraisal of millennial divorce.
What does it mean to leave an institution you never viewed with much piety anyway?
Husbands / fill up / the whole world, one begins.
Block / the horizon / take charge / make / decisions / are everywhere.
Ditlevsen herself married and divorced four spouses.
Its a lot less cutesy than it sounds.
FictionalSplits
Not autobiographical, just good old juicy divorce (or near-divorce) stories.
Gently comic high jinks ensue.
(Nicole Holofcener is set to write the upcoming movie version.)
Rachel remembered it inchoately, the way you half remembered a smell.
Suddenly, she wanted to fuck, and she wanted to fuck all the time.
Human sexual partners end up paling in comparison to a meticulously programmed AI chatbot.
The end of her 20-year marriage is the catalyst for a long-delayed reckoning with her past.
After (or sometimes, regrettably, during) marriage, the deluge in the form of newfound lust.
Being in love makes me selfish and mean, puts blinkers on me, she writes.
I get tunnel vision.
I want, I want, I want.
August 5, 2025; Greywolf
What begins as a memoir about infertility becomes one about unexpected divorce.
It morphs once more as Caldwell starts sleeping with women again.
She muses as much on her narrative about-faces as on her fertility-clinic appointments and Tinder dates.
Your satisfaction will depend on your appetite for memoirists who dissect their own book as theyre writing it.
If youre writing about your life in real time, she asks, are you inherently fucked?
Illustrations by Kimberly Elliott
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