Julia is a professional nerd who can be spotted in the wild lounging with books in the park in Brooklyn, NY. She has a BA in International Studies from the University of Chicago and an MA in Media Studies from Pratt Institute. She loves fandom, theater, cheese, and Edith Piaf. Find her at juliarittenberg.com.
One of the great joys of memoir is reading about every kind of possible life that a person could live. However, one aggressive gap within personal writing has always been stories of women who end up unmarried. Even that prefix implies that “married” is the correct state of being. At the same time as romance dominates all the fiction lists, readers crave more alternative ways of living presented in stories.
I don’t think my hypothesis is all that crazy—All Fours by Miranda July was declared one of the defining books of 2024, and multiple other publications noted the trend of divorce memoirs taking over the year.
Today’s roundup focuses on cisgendered women and the way they live outside of marriage, but this is a constant discussion in memoir and nonfiction by queer authors. If you’re looking for methods of how to live without prescribed pathways, queer stories are the way to go.
Now that this a trend, we can think about divorce as a more regular stage in people’s lives, instead of a stigmatized marker of failure. But going past divorce—what is next? More importantly, with no marriage, what does life look like? These writers have a lot to say.
Divorce
This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz
Lyz Lenz’s account of her divorce is probably familiar to a lot of heterosexual women in the Untied States. She found out in 2016 that she and her husband had a deep political divide, and on top of that, he literally never cared about house work. The divorce as a difficult but eye-opening process, and her post-divorce life opened her up in ways she could not have expected. Lenz also lays out the history of marriage and divorce to clarify the stakes for modern American women.
All Access members continue on for more memoir and nonfiction about non-marriage
English (US) · 