When the proto-feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft decided to marry the philosopher William Godwin, in 1797, she was thirty-eight, pregnant with their first child together, and had had a daughter out of wedlock with another man. Only five years earlier, she’d published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a historic manifesto that one might expect to have secured her radical bona fides. But many in Wollstonecraft’s inner circle of anti-establishment intellectuals scorned her capitulation to wifehood. In a letter to a friend, one former lover snarked that he could scarcely believe the “assertrix of female rights” and “balancier of political justice” had caved to social convention by getting hitched. When Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to a daughter (the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein), a grief-stricken Godwin wrote a memoir of the couple’s brief and actually-not-so-conventional romance, detailing his late wife’s psychological turbulence and all the sex she’d enjoyed outside of holy matrimony. This time, it was polite society that turned up its nose—at Wollstonecraft and at the feminist cause.
Though she wasn’t a divorcee herself, Wollstonecraft is an apt opening subject for A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, the 2023 essay collection by the critic and Harper’s editor Joanna Biggs, in which the author undertakes a forensic examination of her own post-divorce reset by excavating the creative and romantic lives of eight literary women. The book is one of several entries into an emerging literary subgenre I’ll call “Millennial Divorce Books,” comprising a number of recent or forthcoming titles by women authors in their thirties to early forties, with the books set in motion, as advertised, by a divorce. In addition to Biggs’s contribution, the category includes 2024 memoirs by Leslie Jamison and Lyz Lenz; Monica Heisey’s bestselling 2023 novel Really Good, Actually; and Sucker Punch, the hotly anticipated essay collection by Scaachi Koul, due in March 2025. But don’t be fooled—the Millennial Divorce Book isn’t really about divorce. At least, not entirely. Instead, these books explore what it means to wrest control of one’s story in the face of a rupture whose cosmic implications are muddier than ever.
Consider their ambiguity a sign of the times. Most of these authors (and their respective narratives) live in a realm where it’s taken for granted that a woman’s identity extends beyond her compliance with the once-prescribed rites of heterosexual marriage and child rearing. This development is as much a cultural update as a sociological fact; it’s not exactly a secret that millennials, in general, are marrying at far lower rates than thirty- and forty-somethings in decades past. When once-obligatory practices become understood as optional, they lose their power to suggest what likely happens next in the plot of any person’s story. And if marriage can’t be universalized into a predictive agent, why should divorce?
But in an age of tradwife influencers and the digital manosphere-coded disparagement of “childless cat ladies”—to say nothing of the legislative assault on women’s reproductive rights in the US—it clearly still means something for a woman to get married (or not), to have children (or not), and to divorce (or, you guessed it, not). A woman isn’t the sum of her conventional milestones, but her marital status nonetheless informs how she is perceived and, more often than some might care to admit, how she is treated. It also can’t help but come to bear on how she sees herself, how she understands her place in the world around her. Though modern divorce is less likely to be freighted by social connotations of either tragedy or triumph, it still matters. How it matters is up to the individual to figure out.
“During my divorce, I remember thinking: am I victim or beneficiary?” Biggs writes, a half decade after the book has been shut on her own marriage, after having come to terms with the unwieldy contours of her post-marital grief. What she mourns is an idea of marriage as a mutually generative artistic enterprise—a kind of fantasy now lost—more than the company of her former spouse or the cozy practicalities of partnership. She finds echoes of her revelation in the biography of Sylvia Plath, whose marriage to the poet Ted Hughes also diverged from the creative and intellectual symbiosis she’d envisioned for herself—infamously, and tragically, so.
Irreconcilable ambitions similarly drive the split Jamison recounts in Splinters, her contribution to the Millennial Divorce canon. Motherhood is the official catalyst, its dizzying transformation the final irreparable breach. But it doesn’t take long to surmise that the author’s ascent to literary superstardom, on the heels of her partner’s own literary disappointment, delivered the relationship its lethal blow. The marriage could not bear the weight of competing aspirations and asymmetric acclaim, burying in its rubble the jointly constructed mythos of two people’s necessity to one another. “I wasn’t sure what narrative arc I was tracing, or what ending I deserved,” Jamison writes of the aftermath.
Others are less uncertain. In Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, one finds traces of a second-wave feminist sensibility propping up the binary of marriage-as-trap / divorce-as-liberation. Lenz, who married young and religious in red-state America, is better poised than some of her peers to stake this particular claim without caveats—and stake it she does, with the trademark zeal of the converted. “Do you want to know how I finally got my husband to do his fair share? Court-ordered fifty-fifty custody, that’s how,” she writes.
But the vanguard is showing signs of moving on, challenging the convention that broken relationships need clear-cut heroes and villains—and pushing against the implication that women can’t be both. “There is no perfect life where one does no damage,” Jamison told the Independent earlier this year. “We are all leaving our detritus. We are all leaving a mess, grieving the lives we didn’t live and owning the harm we did.”
Nuance notwithstanding, heterosexual relationships still show the cracks of a foundation built on uneven terrain. Women work more, earn less, and have to deal with all sorts of residual spillover from centuries of women’s oppression—and that’s before one factors additional marginalized identities (though it’s worth noting that these authors are, with the exception of Koul, white). To varying degrees, Millennial Divorce Books contend with this murkiness. Their central narratives nonetheless reflect a class of women whose lives are less predetermined by law and social convention than ever before in history. These books exist in a realm where women have the liberty to design the kind of life that will suit them. Where women have, in a word, agency.
With agency comes accountability for one’s own happiness. And accountability makes for a far more textured and probing interrogation of marriage and divorce than mere victimhood or misery. It can also, it turns out, be spun into comedic gold.
For Maggie, Heisey’s aimless yet endearing Torontonian protagonist, getting married and divorced before thirty kicks off what some millennial readers might recognize as the uncomfortably familiar quarter-life crisis that orbits a bone-deep fear of failure to launch. Maggie’s divorce isn’t just a loss of partnership; it’s a wrecking ball let loose against her sturdiest pillar of actualized-on-paper adulthood, throwing all that’s left—her floundering career and too-expensive apartment, for instance—into rude relief. “If I wanted meaning, I could find it in my relationship or, if things became very desperate, have a baby,” she retrospectively laments. Under the banner of a marriage, it was easier to feel “buckled in” to a clear and safe trajectory. Now, it’s up to Maggie to write a new script.
Such open-endedness is the order of the day. Excepting Lenz, these authors resist extrapolating from personal narratives to posit absolutes about the state of marriage and disunion; these books are not, for the most part, dealing in grand declarations about the plight of womankind. Their restraint is a revelation unto itself. In these authors’ hands, divorce becomes a conduit for the close reading of individual wants and expectations, puncturing the presumptions that once upheld imagined happy endings to create space for something new. Women are the captains of their destinies and owners of their mistakes. The possibilities are thrilling.
