At the start of Sarah Manguso’s new novel, Liars, she writes: “In the beginning, I was only myself. Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.”
If it’s a story that’s been told ten billion times, it’s now many more. If you look at the bestseller lists, there’s a profusion of new books – both fiction and memoir – on divorce. Many bestselling writers, including Miranda July, Leslie Jamison, Sarah Manguso and this month, Jojo Moyes and Canadian Haley Mlotek are tackling the topic.
What’s behind this trend in “divorce lit,” and what is it about this cultural moment propelling women to rewrite an old story, one that is clearly resonating with readers? And what is different now from previous generations of writers on the topic: Nora Ephron, Erica Jong, Deborah Levy, among others?
Divorce, by the book: Authors Haley Mlotek and Scaachi Koul talk it out
Manguso says she seems to have “hit on a cultural sore spot.” In an interview with The Globe and Mail, she said she was surprised to find “such an incredible army of women that received my book with open arms, professed gratitude, saying it gave them a kind of release from their rage.”
Or as Lyz Lenz, author of This American Ex-Wife, recently told Glamour, the rise of the divorce book coincides with “an untapped vein of female anger in America that is roiling to the surface.”
But it’s more than rage and marital breakdown at play in bestsellers including Liars, All Fours, Splinters and You Could Make This Place Beautiful. What this new wave of divorce books has in common is a desire to subvert and question the patriarchal institution of marriage.
“I think these books all deal in some way with women’s agency and redefining roles in marriage,” says Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press. “As women get more visibility and power, there’s a discomfort ripe for writing about, especially in this moment when we’re seeing progress met by backlash. The re-emergence of Trump and his posse of men, and the pushback on DEI – it’s all about putting us back in our place.”
Stephanie Sinclair, publisher of McClelland & Stewart and herself a divorcée, has seen a wave of submissions coming in about the unravelling or disintegration of marriage. “Almost all of them touched on the invisible load and the complete imbalance of domestic duties,” she said. “There’s a growing awareness about how impossible it is to carry the cultural expectations placed on us in an outdated institution built to serve men. I think writers are now challenging what a traditional relationship should look like.”
Haley Cullingham, senior editor at McClelland & Stewart, who commissioned Haley Mlotek’s divorce memoir No Fault, says that book is about divorce as “a revolutionary act” – not as a shameful thing, no longer something to frame as a failure, but something brave and admirable. “More women are writing towards undoing the patriarchal myth of marriage, and it’s really powerful,” Cunningham says.
What this new wave of divorce books also shares is a focus on personal reinvention and the possibilities for greater freedom outside of a heteronormative relationship. As Manguso points out, they all end with joy. “Even Jane, the narrator in my book, who is arguably the angriest, figures out a way in the end that she can be, in some ways, free.”
And unlike previous generations of divorce books, most of which had happy endings with women finding new partners – books such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love and Glennon Doyle’s Untamed – the current divorce literature is more realistic, more focused on personal rediscovery. As Warner puts it, “we’re in a moment of ascent and change for women during a critical time.”
One of the most popular books on this list, All Fours by Miranda July, is not even about a typical divorce. In the end, the protagonist continues living with her husband in the same house, but each with a new partner and their own rooms while co-parenting their child. In her book, July has given women a new model, albeit one that seems possible only with the kind of money and freedom that comes with the character’s minor celebrity status. Which leads one to ask: is this alternative marital arrangement and having an independent sexual and creative life something that can only happen in fiction?
The author herself hints at that when her narrator tells her friends about her new arrangement, expecting some of them to do the same. “It was like we had all agreed to sneak into the haunted house together, but once inside, giggling and full of nerves, I looked back and discovered that I was alone. Everyone else had chickened out.”
Another parallel in this new wave of books is the recognition, driven home by the COVID pandemic, that the nuclear family is isolating and doesn’t give women space to grow. “I love that more and more women are writing about how the single family unit is no longer the perfect way to operate in the world,” Cullingham says. “About how divorce encourages us to think about community and how to break away from that isolation and engage with the wider world.”
But the explosion of these books is not just a zeitgeist thing. Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters, believes the divorce story is compelling for literary reasons as well. “Because the experience of life rupture is such a deep and gutting one, and the attempt to build a new life in the wake of an old life coming apart … people can come to that story from many angles, many places, many experiences of their own,” she says.
Canadian writer Monica Heisey, author of Really Good, Actually, concurs. Her book is a comedic take on the fallout from the divorce of the 29-year-old narrator. One of the reasons she wrote her book was because of the paucity of divorce stories of women in their 20s. And because “it’s natural when going through major life events to find solace, comfort and humour in similar stories, and there weren’t that many I could find,” she says.
Now, however, she says there are more and more. There is clearly an appetite for such books, whether contemporary or archival. One of them, Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott, was originally written 100 years ago and reissued last year by the publisher. Heisey, who wrote the forward to the reissue, says the story was “shockingly similar” to her own, despite the passing of a century. “There are things that are period-specific: the treatment of women, the casual, open misogyny, the high-proof alcohol lunches, but the emotional core remains as true to the experience of heartbreak my friends and I have gone through.”
“That’s why it’s such an enduring theme in literature,” she says. “Whether you’re heartbroken in 1925 or 2025, it’s the same. But this explosion of women telling stories of divorce chips away at the stigma and suggests it’s receded somewhat. There’s a hunger for these kinds of stories, and women writers are now less embarrassed to talk about it.”
According to Sinclair, Cullingham and others in the industry, the wave is not over. In the coming years, more divorce books will hit the shelves. “As we start to question the value of marriage,” says Cullingham, “that is opening the conversation to question everything we’ve been taught as women and how to be in society. Reclaiming divorce as a revolutionary act opens us up to be able to reclaim and rethink so much more about our lives.”
