Tova Mirvis Chooses Ten Juicy Divorce Novels
Divorce is not particularly fun to live through– but it can be great fodder for fiction. There’s plenty of conflict, built-in narrative momentum, and most of all, characters in their most vulnerable and extreme states, bereft or enraged, guilt-ridden or hell-bent on escape. If the marriage plot marches characters towards resolution, then the divorce plot sweeps them to a fractured and fraught state of disorder.
My novel We Would Never centers around an extremely ugly divorce in which a close-knit Florida family might — or might not — have hired a hitman to kill their former son-in-law. The book was inspired by the true story of the murder of a law professor in Tallahassee. In the early coverage of the news story, journalists speculated that he might have been killed due to a disagreement about legal theory, but then, the article began to note that he had recently been embroiled in a divorce.
At that time, I too had recently been embroiled in a divorce, and I knew how it could unmoor you, how everything fixed was up for grabs – not just possessions and custody but the narrative itself: who was bad, who was good, who will bear the blame, who will exit untarnished. And yet, despite the pain, I came to understand that the way it felt then was not the way it would always feel. It was a sentiment I first glimpsed during my fraught religious divorce ceremony, whose saving grace moment came at the end, when the rabbi officiating wished me a mazel tov, acknowledging that I stood on the brink of a new path.
In this true-crime story that I was so consumed with, there seemed to be no awareness of the possibility of any kind of alternate future.
As the pain of my own divorce receded with time, I continued to follow the news story as members of the ex-wife’s family were eventually implicated and arrested. But it wasn’t the crime part that I was fascinated by but the smaller moments that came before – the escalations, the sadness, the private moments of fury that the news can’t readily supply. A novel, I decided, was the way to excavate those moments and turn this tabloid story into an exploration of family love and loyalty and the hard to solve mysteries of anger and forgiveness.
These ten novels – all by women, many of them Jewish — make use of divorce in various ways. For some it’s at the center while in others, it remains in the background yet casts an ever-present shadow. But all of them offer readers access to the inner lives of characters and all make it abundantly clear: In a divorce, no one gets away unscathed.
Divorce has a way of unsettling every relationship, not just the one with an (ex) spouse. In Laura Zigman’s deeply affecting Small World, the complicated relationship between two divorced sisters is explored with the author’s signature grace and wisdom. Joyce, who has been divorced for a year, is trying to find contentment in the life she has built for herself in Cambridge, MA. Then her sister Lydia, also divorced, decides to move from California to Cambridge and ends up staying with Joyce for longer than either of them planned. Everything that has been left unsaid for so many years begins to emerge, as the sisters navigate the ghosts of their fraught family past. What is most poignant here is the way that Joyce and Lydia, both at crossroads in their lives, come to realize that in order to move forward, they first need to look back into their long-buried history.
Set in the years leading up to World War II, Divorcing is the story of Sophie Blind’s quest to free herself from the misogyny of her time and more specifically from her husband Ezra “who always won. Whatever the issue and regardless who started it, Ezra always managed to make her come out in the wrong.” Complicating the quest is the fact that Sophie is, in fact, dead – decapitated by a Parisian taxi – and yet she is also very much not dead. With the line between dream and reality blurred, a sense of rupture pervades the book, and as one might expect with a novel narrated by an apparently dead woman, there is a haunted quality to these pages. Reading it now, that sense is only increased by the knowledge that Taube died by suicide two weeks after the book’s publication in 1969. At that time, Divorcing was largely ignored, but it was recently reissued by the New York Review of Books, allowing readers a new chance to experience this thorny and complex novel.
It is 1951 and women seeking divorces flock to Reno, Nevada, because “everyone knew you could get a divorce in Reno.” Lois, shy and awkward, arrives at the Golden Yarrow, an upscale “divorce ranch,” to spend the six weeks necessary to establish Nevada residency. Her loneliness feels palpable until Greer, a mysterious and assured New Yorker, arrives with a bruised face and a confidence that awakens Lois’s desire to take charge of her own life. Unlike some of her fellow residents, Lois seeks a divorce not due to abuse but because she felt that if she stayed in the marriage she would disappear. ‘Girls don’t usually come here because they have not-awful husbands,” says one of the ranch managers, and when the reader is given glimpses of these various marriages, the moving underlayer of this engrossing novel comes sharply into focus. Divorce exacts a price, but then, so does marriage.
Fleishman is in Trouble – Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Early on, life post-split turns out to be not so bad for Toby Fleishman as he, newly proficient in the use of dating apps, has women eager to meet his every need. But when his ex-wife Rachel drops the kids off at his apartment and disappears, the true impact of their separation begins to make itself known. We hear plenty of Toby’s opinions about the marriage and what lead to its demise – it’s like getting the inside story on a friend’s ugly divorce, with all the details you want and some that you don’t. Initially Rachel’s perspective is more elusive, but when her version enters the foreground, an entirely different story emerges, turning the novel into a scorching exploration of female fury and trauma. In her dense, exuberant style, Brodesser-Akner evokes not just the anger but the crushing sadness of a failed marriage. “Divorce is about forgetfulness—a decision to stop remembering the moment before all the chaos—the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart.”
In this spare, evocative novel, a wife obsesses about the ex-wife who preceded her – she is never named, always she. Though the current wife rarely sees the ex-wife, she looms over her life. “Sometimes when I could not sleep – many nights, actually; I have insomnia – I tried to count the number of times during their marriage that they made love.” Philip Roth makes a brief and unexpected appearance in the novel, as a means of trying to metabolize the narrator’s own guilt about her various ambivalences. Ultimately the narrator’s obsession with the ex-wife exposes the trouble spots in her own marriage. Divorce, it turns out, is not quite a final ending. We are in a marriage not only with our spouses but with all those who have come before us.
The Intermission – Elyssa Friedland
After five years of marriage, Cass is not feeling as sure about the relationship to her husband Jonathan as she once was. Before they try to have a baby together, she suggests a marital “intermission” — six months of separation to decide if they are better together or apart. Told from both the husband’s and wife’s points of view, the novel is fast-paced and fun even as it probes the question of how well we know the people we are married to. What secrets can be shared, and what is the impact of those that can’t? The answers are not always clear, but Friedland illuminates the fact that marriages are rarely perfect, and neither are the people who inhabit them.
Warren and Sarah, college lovers, run into each other at a performance of Tosca in New York City, after not seeing one another for almost forty years. Sarah is long divorced, while Warren is married, unhappily — his wife Janet “is like a stone, barnacled, mossy, sunk deep in cold black waters, linked to him by a long, heavy seaweed-hung rope.” When Sarah and Warren begin an affair and decide that they want to be together, Warren tells Janet that he wants a divorce. “[Janet] puts her hands over the whole lower part of her face, covering her open mouth, her eyes spilling over. She begins to sob. “Please don’t. I don’t want you to do this. Please don’t leave. Please. You can do whatever you want. Just don’t leave me.” The question of whether Warren can — or should — extricate himself from the marriage fuels the novel, as Robinson lays bare the responsibilities we have to our partners and children and to the sometimes consoling, sometimes suffocating structures of family life. In this gorgeous and excruciating novel, there are no easy answers, just the brutal complications of love and life.
In Heartburn, the 1983 novel by the legendary Nora Ephron, food writer Rachel Samstat discovers, late in her pregnancy, that her husband Mark is having an affair. Set in the gossipy politics-obsessed Washington DC milieu, the book was widely regarded as being a fictionalized account of Ephron’s marriage and subsequent divorce to the journalist Carl Bernstein. The similarities resulted in a lawsuit and required Ephron to make some changes when the book was turned into a movie – which Ephron wrote about in a 2004 essay for The Guardian in which she parsed what it meant to write a “thinly disguised” version of her own life: “What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life?” she asked, concluding with this observation: “I knew the moment my marriage ended that someday it might make a book – if I could just stop crying. One of the things I’m proudest of is that I managed to convert an event that seemed to me hideously tragic at the time to a comedy – and if that’s not fiction, I don’t know what is.” Whether or not all the details of this novel are true matter little; Heartburn is funny and withering, sardonic and unwavering.
If you’re in the mood for another lighter take on divorce, read Diane Johnson’s novel Le Divorce where marital trouble is the backdrop to a comedy of manners about American expatriates in Paris. Charles-Henri – the French husband of California native Roxy — falls in love with a French woman who is, as it happens, also married to an American. (And like Rachel in Heartburn, Roxy is also pregnant at the time of this revelation.) Here, it’s not the divorce that ignites the strongest feeling but a painting that turns out to be valuable. The fighting grows more bitter as all the family members – French and American – descend, culminating in a kidnapping, a murder and trip to Euro Disney. As one character muses, “divorce is a catastrophe only if you believe it to be so.”
And finally, Liars, which is a perfect title for a book about divorce, making the case that when it comes to explaining the events of a divorce, we are all liars in one way or another. Jane, a successful writer, has put up with every manipulation and excuse that her less-successful artist husband has dished out. He “was the main character, and I was his wife,” she muses. Jane congratulates herself on reaching their ten year anniversary as though it were the end of a grueling marathon – but maybe this is what marriage is supposed to feel like, she consoles herself, sometimes convincing herself and the reader as well. When the marriage finally explodes, Jane’s reckoning is not just with the events of the marriage but with the story she has allowed herself to believe. Of all these novels, it’s a line from this one that haunts me the most. “In a divorce, there are no assurances … Anyone might do anything to anyone.”
