Why I'm Addicted to Divorce Narratives
They're the ultimate vehicle for tough truths and Cusk is relentless behind the wheel
News & Reviews Magazine
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Ever since Astrid wrote about being addicted to dystopias I’ve been thinking about my own literary addiction: divorce narratives.
There’s a lot about wedding culture I don’t understand or subscribe to, and there’s a lot about marriage in our culture that truly baffles me. As someone who is in a strong relationship (I’ve been with my partner for almost 12 years and am very in love with him and very happy about it all) I don’t read divorce narratives with the same preparatory, reassurance-seeking sense that Astrid described wanting from dystopian stories. For me it’s more anthropological. Remember in Rick Morton’s brilliant memoir, One Hundred Years of Dirt, how when he was little his mum said he was an alien sent to earth to report on things? Reading about marriage and divorce is like this for me. I am fascinated by how other people live, and I think the promises we make to ourselves when we make promises to others are supercharged with meaning and insight.
As a feminist, I’m curious about why women keep marrying men—and staying married to them—when statistically it so often isn’t great for them. Like most of my work, it comes down to the interaction between individuals and systems. Studies pretty consistently show that women are less happy than men in heterosexual marriages. Women are also much more frequently the party to catalyse divorce proceedings. ‘While married men experience multiple perks–including living longer and earning more money–women don’t usually benefit from their relationships in the same way.’ Divorce could be contagious too. If a woman has a friend who gets a divorce, a possibility is unlocked in her mind. On some level that means that women in communities with higher social costs to divorce are likely to stay in marriages they’d really rather leave. (Break-ups in same-sex marriages fascinate me too. Did these two people revert into some kind of gender-binary-coded power dynamic? And if their relationship still failed despite them having transcended a binary approach, what does that mean?) What all of these things combine to tell me, is that if I’m reading a book in which a divorce takes place, it will almost always involve a woman making a colossal change in her life. Picture me rubbing my hands together with glee.
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