For a brief period of time this month, I started to wonder whether I was the only female essayist in America who was not either getting or considering a divorce.
Leslie Jamison’s new memoir, “Splinters,” recounts how the unraveling of her relationship coincided with the birth of her daughter. Emily Gould’s union didn’t end, but came awfully close — in an intimate article for New York Magazine a few weeks ago, she chronicles a painful and prolonged separation. By the end, she and her husband have moved toward reconciliation, but it’s millimeter-by-millimeter and day-by-day.
“This American Ex-Wife,” a blistering new book by Lyz Lenz, is partly a memoir and partly an exultation of divorce itself, meant to empower certain women to leave the certain kinds of husbands who are disempowering them. In the passage I saw most cited online — as in, Oh God, can you imagine? — Lenz describes how she spent years thinking she was flighty and forgetful because some of her most beloved possessions (clothing, coffee mugs) kept going missing. Then one day, prepping for a garage sale in the basement, she found all her treasures in a box. It turned out her husband hadn’t liked them, she writes, and his solution was to hide them from her while making jokes about how she was scatterbrained.
Advertisement
That actually wasn’t the relationship-ender, though. The final straw, she writes, occurred when she came home from a work trip to find a bag of garbage on a bench near the back door. This was a recurring fight: her husband would empty the kitchen trash but never actually take it outside. It would sit on the indoor bench, reeking, until Lenz caved and finished the job herself. This time the bag had tipped over and the trash was all over the floor. It had been decaying there for God knows how long, and Lenz decided that she could not stay in a marriage where she had to be in charge of the trash even while traveling on business, where her spouse acted as though a chore was beneath him but not beneath her.
“It soon became clear,” Lenz writes, about the moment she determined that her relationship was holding her back rather than supporting her, “I could be successful, or I could be married.”
Gould’s husband had good intentions, she writes, but he also had the steady job while she worked freelance. It made sense for him to pursue his career while she ran the home and squeezed her own career in around the edges. At least, that’s what she told herself, until all the home-running and career-squeezing filled her with resentment.
Advertisement
Jamison’s book is more lyrical than linear: she tells us vaguely that her marriage ended because her former husband started to be very angry all the time. We don’t know exactly what happened, but the few paragraphs that address the anger’s cause hint at personal and professional jealousy: his last book flopped, she writes, while hers was a runaway success, and he missed receiving Jamison’s attention that now went to the baby.
What banal endings. What universal ones, too, to anyone who has ever had to consider the math of a relationship: what it means to add up chores, hours, patience, unwashed dishes, career advancement, love — and to then divide those things into roughly equal parts where each spouse gets and gives the same.
End of carouselAll of these treatises about divorce are really, no surprise, about marriage. Who benefits from it? Who carries it? Who gets to be the show pony and who has to be the workhorse? What should we make of the statistic that Lenz offers us, that 70 percent of divorces are initiated by wives, while their husbands seem shocked to realize that things aren’t actually fine? She cites research and anecdotes pointing to the conundrum of modern marriages: Wives may have entered the workforce, but husbands still haven’t entered the kitchen to pick up the slack. Can marriage be saved?
Advertisement
Coincidentally, “This American Ex-Wife” came out one week before another similarly titled book that has also received a lot of attention.
“American Woman” by New York Times correspondent Katie Rogers, is subtitled “The transformation of the modern first lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden.” In it, she explores how five women have navigated one of the oddest gigs in the United States: being the professional spouse to the leader of the free world. The role is glamorous but entirely unpaid. It is laden with expectations and protocol but no actual job description. A chipper view of the first lady role is that the job is about tackling a big issue — physical fitness for Michelle Obama, literacy for Laura Bush — with lots of funding and national attention. A more dour view is that the job is keeping one man on an even keel so he doesn’t get funny with the nuclear codes.
In this way, “American Woman” is also a book about marriage, or more specifically, how even the most rarefied couples in the country find themselves making the same calculations that less-famous, less-powerful married couples are making everywhere on a daily basis. Hillary Clinton thought she could use her law degree to help with policy in the White House, but she ended up feeling as if the public just wanted her to “stay home and bake cookies.” Michelle Obama had made nearly $275,000 a year at the University of Chicago Medical Center, but once Barack won, she immediately did what was expected of her and quit her job. Her most important role, she told late-night talk show hosts, would be helping her family adjust to White House life.
Advertisement
In the world of “This American Ex-Wife,” marriage is what is holding some women back. In “American Woman,” marriage is what’s holding the country together: first lady after first lady renouncing her own sense of self in service to her country and to the husband who must lead it.
Whatever you think of Melania Trump — I’m not a huge fan — I frankly loved reading the chapters in “American Woman” that depict her not giving a crap about the first lady role, wandering around the residence wearing a bathrobe and assembling photo albums of home decor, and complaining to a friend on the phone that she didn’t want to deal with the official White House Christmas decorations.
Whatever you think of Jill Biden — as the daughter of an English professor, I’m a fan — I also loved reading about the behind-the-scenes back-and-forth between Jill and Joe as they debated whether she should keep working as a professor at Northern Virginia Community College. In one scene, the president asks how many courses she’ll teach. Only a handful, right? “I’m teaching 15 credits,” Dr. Biden responds. “It’s a full course load.”
Advertisement
She was thrilled, of course, that her husband had won the presidency, and she would support him in almost every way she could. But she would expect him to support her, too. Her Instagram account would host plenty of official first lady content, and it would also show her looping a briefcase over her arm, standing on the NVCC campus, ready for the first day of school.
I think there is so much marriage content right now because the state of the union is in flux. The way it worked for decades doesn’t work for many people anymore, and maybe it never did. The way it will work in the future is still being hashed out — and it’s worth noting that my rosy example, the high-powered success story of Jill and Joe, is facilitated by personal chefs, maids, schedulers, the Secret Service and Air Force One.
For the rest of us, those of us who aren’t married to presidents or to gaslighters, the best we can hope for is this:
Advertisement
The night before I started this column, I emptied my daughter’s diaper pail, and then I set the bag on the front porch while I went to grab the bathroom trash, too. Then I got distracted by a phone call, and I forgot all about my chore, until three or four in the morning when I woke up and realized that the diaper trash was still on the stoop, that it was now pouring down rain, and that by morning the bag would be sodden and extra disgusting and maybe picked apart by raccoons.
Instead, when I got up the next morning the bag was gone. It was already in the big trash can. It turns out my husband had spotted it after I’d gone to bed and — because this is the kind of marriage you get if you are lucky, the give-and-take kind, the fill-in-the-gaps kind — carried it out himself.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZMC1xcueZqmnp5q%2FcH6Pa2toaGNkfXN71qKtnqtdlr%2Bmec2oq2aZnKF6s7XGoato