The Divorce Memoir Is Coming Out of the Shadows

glamour.com:

Ex-Wife—she didn’t put her name on the cover. The story is a thinly-veiled retelling of Parrot’s own , and at the time of its publication—the dusk of the Jazz Age, a blissful few months before the stock market crash—readers went wild trying to discover who wrote the scandalous book and just how much of her real-life experience she poured into its pages.Nearly a century later, with a jazzy new cover and the author’s actual name in bold letters, tales of divorce dominate the best-seller list.

Women writers like Parrot and Nora Ephron, of Heartburn fame, once tucked the salacious truth of their failed marriages in fictitious characters and autofictional romps about town.

But now, a whole new class of authors are detailing the ins and outs of their —and selling millions of copies along the way.“The divorce book has always been there, but there is an untapped vein of female anger in America that is roiling to the surface,” said journalist and author . “We're in a moment where women are really angry, and these books are rising to the surface of our discourse in a way they haven’t before.”Just this year, a slew of new books joined the now-ubiquitous canon: Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, Leslie Jamison’s Splinters and, most recently, Anna Marie Tendler’s much-anticipated Men Have Called Her Crazy.

But these latest additions to the exploding subgenre are exploring marriage from new and interesting angles: rather than mapping a way out of a relationship, they’re exploding the whole system from within.“I think these books by women are really unpacking not just marriage and divorce but patriarchy,” said Maggie Smith, the poet and author of her own divorce memoir, 2023’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful.