It wasn’t a divorce memoir per se. When Ursula Parrot published her first novel—1929’s sensational Ex-Wife—she didn’t put her name on the cover. The story is a thinly veiled retelling of Parrot’s own dramatic split, 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, when Parrot’s book went back into print with a jazzy new cover and the author’s actual name in bold letters, tales of divorce dominate the bestseller 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 marriage breakups—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,” says journalist and author Lyz Lenz. “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,” says Maggie Smith, the poet and author of her own divorce memoir, 2023’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful. “There are all these issues that ripple out from the stone of the divorce being thrown into the pond. The ripples are much bigger than that transactional event.”
Today the stigma of divorce is not nearly as damning as it was in Parrot’s time. Over the last handful of years, people are getting married at later ages, and the divorce rate has been steadily decreasing, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control. But you wouldn’t know it from taking a look around your local bookstore; the allure of these narratives seems to only be growing stronger, even among readers who have not been divorced—or married at all. Another look at the data reveals a majority of divorces are initiated by women—and so, unsurprisingly, the divorce memoir canon is ruled by women’s voices and stories.
“The way divorce exists in our culture is that you don’t have to have been divorced to be affected by it,” says Haley Mlotek, author of the forthcoming divorce memoir No Fault. “It’s become so common that it really is twinned with getting married and staying married, and every year that someone stays married, the eyebrows go up. ‘Oh — 10 years! How do you do it?’”
A previous generation of divorce memoirs promised a happy ending at the end of the rainbow. Elizabeth Gilbert’s blockbuster memoir Eat, Pray, Love takes her readers on an international voyage of self-discovery, and it ultimately ends with her finding love again at her final destination in Bali (though, interestingly enough, that romance also ended in Gilbert’s second divorce in 2016). Glennon Doyle’s wildly successful Untamed interweaves stories of life after divorce to her husband and new lessons from her subsequent marriage to soccer icon Abby Wambach.
But this new crop of divorce memoirs makes no such promises, Smith said.
“I think what we’re seeing now is the story is coming from women who find themselves, either by choice or not by choice, having to sort of build a different kind of life for themselves, who find a way to recalibrate or reinvent themselves or start over or ground themselves in what they know to be true about themselves,” she says “These are human stories where we get to see people go through upheaval and not necessarily come out great. They don’t have to have happy endings.”
Talking with these authors and other fans of the subgenre, we struggled to think of a male author whose divorce book achieved the same level of prominence. Perhaps that ubiquity is its own sign of progress, Lenz says.
“When my book came out, Leslie Jamison’s book came out on the same day,” she recalls. “People said, ‘Isn’t it crazy? Two divorce books hit the bestseller list!’ and I said, ‘World War II books do this all the time.’”
The Essential Divorce Reading List
If you want to dive deep on this burgeoning subgenre, we’ve compiled a handful of books to help you get started, from the early days of the divorce memoir to today’s blockbuster hits.
This 1929 novel details the dissolution of a “modern” marriage amidst the splashy background of Jazz Age New York. Parrot originally published it anonymously, but once word of her authorship got out, she became an international icon of divorce.
While Tendler’s 2024 book doesn’t explicitly address her divorce from comedian John Mulaney, the various specters of her romantic relationships loom large in this story of hospitalization and healing.
Ephron may be best known for reinventing the romantic comedy on screen. Her 1983 novel—itself inspired by her marriage to legendary journalist Carl Bernstein—carries the humor and tenderness fans later came to love in such classic films Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail.
In this 2012 memoir, Cusk chronicles life after a decade of marriage—and how she works to remake life for herself as well as her daughters.
Lenz’s 2024 book tells multiple stories: the personal story of her own marriage and how it broke apart; the reported story of how Americans think about divorce; and the sociological story of women’s quest for power in a patriarchal world.
When Harper’s husband told her he couldn’t move with her to support her career as an emergency room doctor, she filed for divorce. Her 2020 book shares lessons from patients, colleagues, and others she met on her path back to happiness.
Strayed’s 2012 memoir chronicles her physical and emotional journey on an 1,100-mile trek from California to Washington State. The book inspired a book club boom, a flood of hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail, and later, an award-winning movie starring Reese Witherspoon.
Finnamore had achieved previous acclaim for Otherwise Engaged, her novel about wedding culture and all its accompanying anxieties. Her 2008 divorce memoir examined that obsession on the other side of her husband’s marriage-ending affair.
Patchett’s 2013 book examines not one but two marriages—her tumultuous first one, then her much happier second one. She also writes of other long-lasting relationships with friends, family, and even her Nashville bookstore.
Koul won readers in 2017 with her hilarious and cutting collection of essays One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter. Her 2025 collection will explore divorce, loss, and more with that same signature style.
One could say Levy’s 2018 book is less divorce memoir and more cultural criticism. She writes of how she and other creatives, including James Baldwin and Elena Ferrante, struggle to balance their artistic and personal lives.
Smith’s 2023 book takes its title from a line in “Good Bones,” her viral poem. But the acclaimed poet turned to the memoir genre to write of her divorce and life afterwards.
After divorcing a fellow writer, Jamison struggled to balance life as a newly single mother with her own dreams of romance and art. Her 2024 memoir is at times painful, funny, and brilliant—sometimes all within a single page.
Mlotek’s memoir won’t hit bookshelves until 2025, but other writers are already praising her incisive look at a life shaped by divorce and its ripple effects.
This 2006 blockbuster memoir spans three countries, diverse cultures, and romantic epiphanies. Gilbert later wrote of her post–Eat, Pray, Love celebrity in two subsequent books, Committed and Big Magic.
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