I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but when my own life imploded last year, it was almost annoyingly on trend. 2023 was (so says celebrity media!) “the year of celebrity divorce.” See: Sofia Vergara, Reese Witherspoon, Ariana Grande, Natalie Portman, and, I guess, Kevin Costner. Some of them got messy.
We are also in a golden age of divorce memoirs: Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Kimberly Harrington’s But You Seemed So Happy and this year’s twin divorced bestsellers: Leslie Jamison’s Splinters and our own Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife.
All of these books explore what is hard, messy, and ultimately quite beautiful about divorce. They show us women on the other side, finding, or re-finding, themselves. They are stories of liberation. And so it’s not surprising that we are also seeing a backlash to this new joyful divorce narrative. Yes of course from David Brooks, but I’ll let lyz continue to handle him. Conservative hand wringers are never not going to be scared of women who choose lives without men at the center of them.
But this call is also coming from inside the house, with a new kind of divorce backlash coming from women who identify as feminists. And we need to talk about it.
