1.
It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking your divorce is interesting. Acute self-absorption is not attractive. Some good advice from Frederick Barthelme in his famed 39 Steps: “If you write a sentence that isn’t poignant, touching, funny, intriguing, inviting, etc., take it out.”
2.
The best writing about divorce often comes in medias res, when the bewilderment and hurt are the greatest, but it’s also true that these sentences that may prove to be most cringeworthy ten or twenty years from now. Your readers may have a more charitable view, especially if their own divorce is recent.
3.
There are stories which we are willing to tell publicly, stories we only tell our family and “friends of virtue,” stories we tell only to ourselves, and stories we are not ready to tell, even to ourselves. The more you resist telling a story, the more likely it needs to be told for you to take the next steps forward, in life as in writing.
4.
If you choose to write about your divorce, recall the mantra of method actors: What is my motivation?
5.
Before you pick up your pen or face the blank screen intending to write about your divorce, read other writers who have written well on the topic. Joelle Fraser’s The Forest House is especially good on the agony of being alone when your children are with the ex. Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard write very differently, but poignantly, about divorce. Ann Beattie’s early New Yorker stories often featured couples divorcing, and John Updike made a career writing about affairs and divorces.
6.
Widen your lens to include social and economic forces that create and exacerbate conditions of personal misery. Don’t limit yourself to a bourgeois vocabulary. Show some understanding of the history of family life, the social construction of patriarchy, and the radical shift in the meaning assigned to children that occurred with the rise of capitalism. Marx’s concepts of alienation, exploitation, and surplus labor are critically important tools of analysis when applied to the idea of the family and why it is that we so often fail to live into our highest ideals. Shorthand: government should help make it easier to be good; capitalism moves in the opposite direction, making everything a commodity, including impossible standards of beauty and gendered double standards, children, childcare, sex, dating, religion, leisure time—well, you get the idea.
7.
Consider tackling the history and meaning of “Romance” itself. Alain de Botton points out the obvious: When love fails, we hold everyone and everything responsible other than our actual ideas about love. This is tragic. In matters of love, it’s helpful to have a low anthropology: we’re all morons and madness is general. It’s also helpful to remember that the 19th-century Romantic movement gave us an extremely lofty anthropology, creating high expectations. No amount of information seems able to shake us from our faith in love. A thousand divorces pass by our doors; none seem relevant to us. Why?
8.
You may be tempted to believe that you will be spare your family from suffering by choosing to write about your divorce as an “autofiction” rather than non-fiction, as a novel rather than a memoir, thinking you can escape a world of bad feeling by masking everything in fiction. Think again. It’s certainly true that one person’s freedom may engender suffering for those who remember the divorce differently. But no writer can afford to be held hostage by other people’s memories. Ask yourself: what will be the consequences if I write this? Will I be punished? Will that punishment be any worse than the punishment I am inflicting on myself by not being free to write what I recall? Can the writerly imperative be removed by an ex, or anyone else?
9.
Whether you write the narrative as memoir or autofiction, you must free yourself from shame which pre-emptively disallows the writing. You may choose to withhold certain details that may cause suffering when writing a memoir, and this can be a difficult decision to make, but if you choose for that reason to tell your story as a fiction, you will not escape the possibility of bad feelings and misunderstandings.
10.
As contrasting “case studies” in how to write about divorce as both memoir and as autofiction, explore Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard. Here is an essay by David W. Berner, with links to fascinating interviews with both writers. Here is my interview with Roxana Robinson on the topic of Knausgaard, memoir, and novel. Here is an interview with Knausgaard in The New Yorker, about the way his thinking has changed since he completed the novel, and whether he has regrets about writing it.
11.
If you elect to write fiction, tell the truth in fiction. Begin by writing the truest sentence about divorce that you know. What follows from that sentence must be true as well. Continue to lay down true sentences, scrubbed of self-pity, staying clear of false drama, giving the quotidian its due (Updike). Like railroad track, lay down your sentences one by one, and follow the engine of your writerly desire.
Don’t play “hide the thimble” with your reader. The first paragraph—hell, the first sentence– is not too soon to alert your reader about what is to come. Here is an example from a story written by Frederick Barthelme:
“Jerry Jordan was upset the morning he found out his wife, Ellen, had a lover. The first thing he did was refuse to carry the army-green garbage sack to the edge of their driveway for the men to pick up, thinking if he did not carry it, it would not be carried, and that this would be a clear natural consequence of her action not lost on Ellen. As it turned out, Ellen, in a bit of drama Jerry characterized as “endearingly small,” took the garbage itself, making a great show of it, banging the overstuffed sack into walls and doorjambs, groaning under its weight, pausing to rest, and catch her breath more than conceivably necessary.”
Because this is a Frederick Barthelme story, we move fluidly from the quotidian (taking out the garbage, as good a metaphor for divorce as any) to the comic, with Barthelme’s trademark off-kilter dialogue:
“You’re kind of a complex molecule, here,” Jerry said, circling a finger toward her mat and the debris she was clearing away.
She stopped at the kitchen door and turned to stare at him, her eyes narrowed, a bemused expression on her face.
~ from Frederick Barthelme’s story, “Perfect Things”
Finally, consider writing your divorce as a poem. Here is one of mine:
divorce
the story continues
but without us
as main characters
there was a
truth to our lives
that went beyond facts
i want a life with
clean sheets
gleaming glasses
the broad atlantic
starched white napkins
wood fire
view to the east
a breakfast of
chocolate & oranges
the courage to
live when one’s best
days are past
but for now
a spoon of tea
an empty cup
this worn toothbrush
seem as strange as a
suitcase of snow
– From Gary Percesepe, falling
