Why Are Divorce Memoirs Trending?

Divorce rates may be down in the U.S. from their all-time high in the 1980s (although so are marriage rates), but the popularity of divorce seems to be on the rise. You can find funny divorce cards, tote bags with sarcastic quotes (“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness clearly never paid for a divorce”), and even water bottle stickers encouraging men to proclaim their “respect for the ex.” Divorce parties reached an all-time high in 2023, the same year best-selling author and poet Maggie Smith released her divorce memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, which was followed by a slew of popular divorce memoirs in 2024. The trend gained notice in the New York Times, Glamour, Washington Post, and The Atlantic, among others. While each couple’s story is unique, they are bound by a common theme: These female authors view marriage as an unfair situation in which they can neither be fully themselves, nor fully explore and use their gifts and talents. 

One former women’s magazine editor wrote an essay entitled “All* of my friends are ending their marriages . . . *and I’m pretty sure I know why.” In it, she notes that it is her female friends in heterosexual marriages who have generally been married to “good guys,” rather than to abusive men, who are filing for divorce. For many of these women, divorce signals what they see as a positive change. It’s even tucked into the vocabulary: the “ending of a marriage” rather than “a divorce.” Memoirist Haley Mlotek, author of No Fault, says that divorce is now “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?’” The critically acclaimed 2019 film Marriage Story plays on this confusion of concepts: Despite its title, the film is actually about a divorce.

The pop culture narrative around divorce has taken a turn toward framing divorce as an often-necessary evil for women who want to be most fully themselves. Its ability to enable their self-fulfillment is something to be celebrated. While they love their children, and sometimes even their ex-husbands, these women tend to see marriage as part of a larger, more problematic patriarchal system. Maggie Smith describes the divorce memoir trend as “unpacking not just marriage and divorce but patriarchy. . . . 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.”

This wider cultural conversation is often spurred on, however, by smaller events, commonly seen as transactional. Women are speaking openly about the burden of carrying the weight of domesticity, usually in relation to trying to establish or maintain a career as well as care for children. In Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, Leslie Jamison describes the grueling nature of taking her newborn on a book tour, something that her husband did not join her for: “Taking my baby on tour was a way of saying, I can be the father who goes away, and the mother who stays.” 

In an effort to help couples sort through the many tasks involved in living family life, and particularly to help men see the “invisible work” of the home done by their wives, author Eve Rodsky decided to apply organizational management principles to marriage. “Fair Play” is a gamified system of domestic organization. In addition to a best-selling book, you can buy a pack of Fair Play cards, which list over one hundred household tasks. Each task includes not only the execution, but the conception and planning as well—the “mental load” aspect of domesticity that often remains unseen or unspoken. 

But for one woman, the conversation about “Fair Play” with her husband eventually led to their divorce. In her essay “Our Fair Play Discussion Signaled the End of My Marriage,” Cindy DiTiberio explains how she found herself trying to build a career while also caring for her daughter and carrying what she felt was more than her fair share of the domestic burden. When the pandemic arrived, she decided to let her career take the hit, because her husband not only earned more money but also owned his own business. Still, she was unhappy. Even if her husband pitched in when asked, “I wanted the weight of the mental load to be lighter, not to dole out tasks like a sergeant in the army.” 

After they went through the deck of Fair Play cards, DiTiberio’s husband “pulled up a spreadsheet of all he did for his clients, all the tasks he was tasked with at work. He felt like his paid work, and how much bandwidth that required, should be factored into the equation.” Her reaction? “Dumbfounded shock.” She writes that while she knew “he was exhausted and overworked,” domestic work like “baths and bedtimes and walking the dog and taking out the trash, cooking meals, cleaning up, folding laundry, making sure the household is maintained . . . was no less his responsibility than mine just because he earned a bigger paycheck.” Two years later, they were divorced.

DiTiberio seems to fit the popular trend: The marriage wasn’t abusive; they just couldn’t get on the same page. Like Smith and Jamison, DiTiberio blames (at least in part) marriage itself for being patriarchal. 

These women’s stories seem to follow an almost uncannily similar pattern: They meet a man, fall in love, get married, and for a while, are happy enough with parallel careers. But then, a baby arrives, and motherhood turns their world upside down. They begin to—naturally or culturally, depending on the perspective—take on more of the childcare and domestic tasks required for family life. Their careers get pushed to the margins, and they are ground down by boring Sisyphean tasks like laundry and carpools. They feel unappreciated, and communication about it seems to lead nowhere. One day, they look up and realize they don’t recognize the person they’ve become. 

In 1991, Wendell Berry described the vision of marriage that seems to be alive and well in the divorce memoir trend:

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided.

Berry names a fatal flaw in modern marriage, but it is tied to another: the view of children as merely incidental add-ons, to be gotten (or disposed of early on) at the whim of the spouses. The problematic nature of this approach is myriad; but one practical issue is its false idea that bringing a child into a family involves the equivalent of simply adding in one more set of tasks to be negotiated. Taking out the trash or doing the dishes lend themselves to being divvied up on a spreadsheet; pregnancy, nursing, and being the listening ear for a sick child who “just wants mommy” or “just wants daddy” do not. 

Children introduce not only new tasks but a new dimension to marriage—usually one that demands far more self-sacrifice than two competent people with independently busy lives have had to engage in before. This seems to come as a surprise to many of the popular divorce memoirists, whose inability to feel fully themselves appears tied to the need to give up quite a bit in service of marriage and family. They feel that if they need to sacrifice, men do too—and in the same way. 

Popular culture both shapes and is shaped by its own expectations. For many decades, we’ve been talking about how men and women are the same, and most of these women have found that to be generally true when it comes to intellectual careers. Berry’s description of marriage “involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed” works—right up until it doesn’t, usually when children and their needs get added to the mix. Spreading one’s limited time and energy between maintaining a marriage, caring for children, and continuing to pursue a demanding career seems to put a lot of couples on thin ice prone to cracking. 

An alternative to the “private political system” vision of marriage comes from the Code of Canon Law: “a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of their whole life.” This partnership of the whole life is not only “ordered by its nature to the good of the spouses” but also toward “the procreation and education of offspring.” While each spouse may take on different roles, tasks, and financial burdens, each of these serve the family as a whole. This hardly seems patriarchal, since the father of the family is no more serving himself than the mother is herself.

If divorce is a social contagion, perhaps stronger marriages can serve as an antidote. As Berry writes, “There are . . . still some married couples who understand themselves as belonging to their marriage, to each other, and to their children. What they have they have in common, and so, to them, helping each other does not seem merely to damage their ability to compete against each other. To them, ‘mine’ is not so powerful or necessary a pronoun as ‘ours.’”