How to write through your divorce

This year, American women’s choices about how and if they will partner and raise a family became a matter of public policy. “Childless cat lady” started as a snide insult from a conservative man and became a proud signifier, the phrase emblazoned across a thousand T-shirts and mugs. Behind all the noise, though, were the millions of women whose personal lives seem to always be up for scrutiny. Where do you go to find an alternative to the squabble, to find descriptions of life much closer to how most women live it?

One answer is the work of writers like Hayley Mlotek, Maggie Smith, and Leslie Jamison. All three of these women have written books that touch on divorce, but each catalogs the loss and change that come from big life events in her own distinct way. In the forthcoming No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, Mlotek does the delicate work of tracing a personal and cultural history of divorce, from the viewpoint of a woman who entered matrimony with her eyes wide open. Smith’s unflinching 2023 memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful gives voice to the frustration, humor, and sadness of uncoupling. And Jamison’s Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, published this year, details the dissolution of a marriage between two artists, while tracing the growth of herself as a woman and a mother.

Here, these authors share some of the books, films, and music that helped inspire their work. Below, a playlist of their best selections.

Hayley Mlotek, author of No Fault: A Memoir of Divorce

Books

The works of Barbara Ehrenreich, the Neapolitan Novels (2012–2015), by Elena Ferrante, Sleepless Nights (1979), by Elizabeth Hardwick, and The Dolphin Letters (2019), by Saskia Hamilton

Barbara Ehrenreich’s influence is present in so much of my own work. Her attention to the practical, material realities of life and the emotional, spiritual dimensions they can contain has had the most profound impact on my own ideas of what writing can be and what I work to make my writing become. For Her Own Good, about advice communicated to women through various forms of media, and The Hearts of Men, about the deliberate invention of the concept of “the bachelor,” are hugely important to No Fault’s approach to cultural critique and historical research. Nickel and Dimed was the first nonfiction book I read that made me realize I could be a writer. Recently, while feeling blocked creatively, I reread Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet. Reading her sentences—with all the clarity of their bracing, direct, brutal simplicity—unlocked something in my mind, and all of a sudden I could write again. I like to read Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights every June, for the satisfying overlap between the calendar and the first sentence. As a critic, I think, she brings tremendous depths up to such a fine point on the surface. Saskia Hamilton’s The Dolphin Letters is a collection of correspondence between Hardwick, her estranged husband, Robert Lowell, and their circle of friends and colleagues. I read it when I was thinking deeply about the responsibilities that writers have to their loves, on the page and off. The collection is the perfect companion for such thoughts.

Movies

Desert Hearts (1985), A Separation (2011), 35 Shots of Rum (2008), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)

I’ve joked that I plan to program a Divorced Women’s Film Festival to promote No Fault, but really, it is not a joke at all—I do hope that I get the chance to do that. Much of the book acts as an accompanying program to this dreamed-of festival, with a long list of films included throughout, but there are a few I love that were not included in the book. But that would definitely be on the bill. Desert Hearts is a sexy, sweaty movie about the phenomenon of divorce tourism in Nevada. A Separation is, as far as I’m concerned, the very best movie ever made about the divisions divorce reveals in a family, particularly when it comes to impossible questions of custody. 35 Shots of Rum has my favorite scene for when I need to see something that painfully conjures the physical experience of yearning for closeness, which is my definition of romance. And Mrs. Doubtfire—which really should be considered alongside all the classic screwball comedies of errors—was one of my favorite movies to watch with my sisters when we were kids.

Music

When I like a song, I tend to listen to it and only it on repeat for hours at a time, and this is particularly helpful for long stretches of writing. These are a few that were particularly important to me at different phases of my writing process: U.S. Girls’s “Poem,” Mitski’s “Nobody,” Kelsey Lu’s “I’m Not in Love,” Lucy Dacus’s “Night Shift,” Japanese Breakfast’s “Posing in Bondage,” and Solange’s “Bad Girls.” I love their combination of bittersweet moodiness and delicate, refined lyrics.

Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Books

Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (2021), by Gina Frangello; Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing (2019), by Elissa Altman; The Chronology of Water (2011), by Lidia Yuknavitch; In the Dream House (2019), by Carmen Maria Machado; Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life (2000), by Abigail Thomas

The genre I tend to read most often is poetry, but as I wrapped my head around writing You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and what it might look and feel like, I immersed myself in memoirs and essay collections. I needed models to explore possibilities in both form and content. Who else was writing about marriage and divorce, grief and loss, and the demands of being an artist-mother, and how were they embodying these experiences on the page? Gina Frangello’s Blow Your House Down and Elissa Altman’s Motherland lent me courage as I considered which stories I wanted to tell. Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, and Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping lent me courage as I considered how to tell those stories. Each of these writers, and each of these books, made it possible for me to do my own work. I imagined these wildly talented women hacking their way through a thick forest, cutting away tangled vines, clearing a path for themselves and for others who might come after them.

Movies

The Babadook (2014), A Ghost Story (2017), His House (2020)

When I was going through my divorce, and when I was writing You Could Make This Place Beautiful, I didn’t have any desire to see other people’s marriages implode onscreen. I didn’t think I could stomach it. I still haven’t seen Marriage Story, for example, despite the fact that I’ve loved all Noah Baumbach’s films. My memoir is part ghost story—grief is a haunting, and memory itself is a haunting—so it makes sense that some of the movies I watched (or rewatched) while I was writing it were horror films: The Babadook, A Ghost Story, and His House. I have two favorite kinds of films: indies that focus on complicated characters and families, and horror films with a paranormal component. The Babadook is a perfect example of a film that lives at the intersection between the two, where the texture and particulars of daily life as a single mother meet the dark and inexplicable. To me, this film is a powerful metaphor for living with grief.

Music

I’ve heard many writers say they can’t listen to music while they work, or at least not music with lyrics. (In which case I recommend Dirty Three, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Explosions in the Sky.) I listen to music almost all the time—cooking, driving, walking the dog—and it doesn’t bother me to hear someone else’s words while I’m writing my own. I make a playlist when I’m working on a book, and the songs become part of the weather; Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters, help set the tone for the work. The playlist for You Could Make This Place Beautiful is just shy of four hours long, and it includes songs by Waxahatchee, the Mountain Goats, Boygenius, Rhett Miller, Andy Shauf, Superchunk, Neko Case, Jason Molina, Fruit Bats, and many other favorites. My most-played records the year I wrote the memoir were Low’s Hey What, Nada Surf’s Never Not Together, and Laura Stevenson’s 2021 self-titled record, which are stylistically very different but all of which are tender and smart.

Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

Books

Sleepless Nights (1979), by Elizabeth Hardwick

During the course of writing Splinters, I kept Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights perched on my nightstand—tempting fate, I know!—and returned to it so many times, I started to think of it as a godmother text—a kind of spiritual ancestor. It’s one of the most powerful literary evocations of divorce I’ve ever read, but it only rarely—and always obliquely—mentions divorce; it describes the pronoun ours as a “teabag of a word, steeped in the conditional,” and that brief moment inspired an entire grammatical subplot in my book, a reckoning with shared custody in the wake of rupture. My own wrestling with the word ours. Proof that an entire emotional crisis can be evoked in the discussion of a pronoun.

Movies

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)

Every time I watch Kramer vs. Kramer, it breaks my heart all over again: a child building a new relationship with each of his parents in the aftermath of their marriage dissolving. A mother’s hunger for freedom coming into conflict with her deep love for her child. A father learning new rituals with his son. The evolving narrative of French toast! It’s a movie that allows its characters to be many ways at once, and that complexity was one of the narrative gods I was trying hard to honor in Splinters.

Music

If there’s a single song that conjures the world and writing of Splinters, it’s Kate McGarrigle’s “Proserpina.” Based on the story of Demeter and Persephone, it’s about the deep bond between a mother and a daughter and how that bond confronts periods of absence and separation. My daughter somehow fell in love with this song as a toddler, and we would listen to it on repeat when we were quarantined together during the early pandemic. It holds the ache but also the sweetness of those days, when I began writing the pages that eventually became Splinters.

Lead image credit:  Hearst 

Also read: 

Also read: