I have never seen Kramer vs. Kramer. It came out in 1979, three years after my parents split up, and they both thought it would be too painful for my sister and me, so they steered us away from it even though every kid we knew had seen it.

I can probably handle it now, if by “handle it” you mean cry my eyes out through the whole thing. That’s what I did yesterday when I watched Is This Thing On? a romantic comedy about a couple with kids who are splitting up, starring Will Arnett and Laura Dern. I loved the movie by the way. Still, I bawled and bawled.

This is my reaction to pretty much any art having to do with divorcing parents. Also to news that parents I know in real life are ending their marriages.

For example, a few years ago, on a long car ride with a possibly divorcing friend (she later changed her mind, whew), she noticed I was getting emotional as she laid out her plan for leaving. She paused and asked, “Is this triggering for you because of your divorce?”

It bears mentioning that I am a once-divorced person who gets upset about other people’s divorces. I was married the first time from 23 to 26, and thank goodness I got out. We didn’t have kids, so I guess that puts our breakup in a different category. I’ll add that kids or no kids, intellectually I am 100% pro divorce. It’s a necessary evil, allowing people to leave untenable marriages and start their lives over. What’s more, as became glaringly evident during and after the pandemic, “the traditional family,” especially with heterosexual parents, has historically been an unfair arrangement for women.

Back to that car ride. I was feeling triggered, but it had to do with the other divorce, the first one, not the one I went through in my late 20s. As the world’s oldest “divorce kid” (that’s what we called my scruffy kind when I was growing up in the south shore Long Island suburbs of the 70s), I carry around a deep 50-year-old wound that seems impervious to treatment. Lord knows I’ve had enough therapy, starting when I was a teen, ending a few years ago when my last therapist closed her practice.

I’ve been hard on myself about this apparent inability to heal or in any way move past what happened to my family in 1976. I’ve only realized lately that it feels like a death, the death of my family of origin. (Something something “grief has no time limit”…)

The night my parents told us they were separating, I petitioned them to think again. Do you want me to be from a broken home?! I cried. Your family of origin is your first psychic home, and when its torn asunder it fractures your basic foundation. Even when the split is for the best—even when parents do their best to minimize the rancor, and otherwise mitigate the fallout—divorce is hard on kids.

The ill effects been well documented with research, like in Judith S. Wallerstein’s The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study, published in 2000. I know that at least one subsequent study is said to have debunked that one, but I call bullshit on that. I mean, I am a walking, talking specimen, and I know so many others just like me. (And by now there’s probably a backlash-to-the-backlash, as often happens with these kinds of reports.)

Maybe it was harder on my generation. When Gen X’s parents divorced, it was the beginning of a new trend—a boom. It took everyone by surprise, and no one knew what the hell they were doing. There were also fewer possibilities then in terms of what a family could look like. Now there are so many other models, and that’s good.

These days divorce is so much more common and there’s much greater awareness about how to make it less traumatic for kids. I really like the idea of “nesting,” in which the divorcing parents take turns living with the kids in the family’s home, as opposed to the kids being shuttled back and forth two or three times a week like I was. In my case, my two residences were an hour apart, in different counties, with two entirely separate casts of main and surrounding characters. That was really jarring for me, emotionally, socially, and even academically, since I often wasn’t sure which residence my text books and notebooks and homework were in.

***

This all began happening when I was 10 and now I’m 60. I can understand if you might feel inclined to tell me to get over it already. It’s old news! I can no longer even imagine my parents together. They’re friendly, which is nice. But when I look back, I don’t recall them ever seeming like a couple.

Still, it makes sense to me that this early, foundational trauma has such a lasting impact. It’s part of who I am, and I suppose it always will be.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, in the 90s I worked on a memoir called Adventures in Divorce. I never got past the proposal phase, and I’m glad I didn’t publish the intended version. It was meant to be what today is called “memoir plus,” a mix of first-person writing and researched reporting.

I’ll confess here that I don’t much like “memoir plus.” I don’t enjoy reading it—I get so much more out of delving into just one person’s well-told story without all the academic posturing and other people’s anecdotes to justify it. And I’m definitely not going to write it. (One editor had suggested I take And You May Find Yourself… in that direction, and I’m glad I didn’t.)

I’ve started very preliminarily sketching out a different version of that book, another memoir-in-essays, and while it will probably be a long while before I want to take that on in a big way, it feels good to start making new sense of it all. Maybe that’s a kind of healing. And maybe it’s time to finally give Kramer vs. Kramer a watch.

In other news…

Tickets are almost sold out for the Joe’s Pub event. You can also attend virtually, as it’s happening or for up to a week afterward, for $10.

Where to find my other work:

• Oldster Magazine

• Memoir Land

• My books

• The audio version of my memoir.

• My website.

Sometimes I have dreams about the years just after I left my first marriage. These dreams are neither happy nor sad. In them, I seem to be trying to figure some things out, like a way to go about life differently. It’s as if my mind is reviewing the story of my past and suggesting narrative edits.

It’s not surprising, I guess, since in my waking hours I often wish I’d made different choices then—Why the rush to find another long-term relationship? Why the exhausting, self-defeating campaigns to land noncommittal men? Why so much emphasis on all of that when I was finally back in New York City, where I had the opportunity to pursue my goals of returning to arts writing, and establishing myself as writer-writer, of fiction and personal essays?

A lot of those dreams take place in my first apartment after getting separated, a small, ground-floor studio at 111 West 74th Street, two steps down from the street. I’d settled on it after an incredible (although weirdly-shaped) studio at The Ansonia fell through. So much happened in that 400 square-foot space between September, ‘92 and September, ‘93—formative experiences of my young adulthood.

I find myself looking back and wishing I’d gone about it all differently. I’m happy with where it all ultimately led me, to the life I’m living now. Still, I have regrets about how haphazardly I approached life, how I squandered those years, beginning when I was a few months shy of 27.

***

I wish I had photos to show you (and me) from that time. I’m weirdly nostalgic for those days in my late 20s, even though they weren’t particularly happy days. I’d just like to look back at some images of myself then, to maybe understand myself better through visual clues. I wish I could somehow enter 111 West 74th Street through that Google Maps photo of the building above, slip through the front door or my window, and travel back 33 years to spy on late 20s Sari.

In the early 90s there were no cellphones yet, let alone cellphones with cameras, and there weren’t digital cameras. I had a Pentax K1000 analogue SLR that I used for photography classes at International Center for Photography. But although I occasionally took pictures of friends for my weekly assignments (like the one below of my old pal Peter and his dog Sophie), for the most part I was just looking for a way to illustrate my own stories as a journalist—to develop a new skill that would make me more of an asset in my field.

I dated a photographer in ‘93/’94, and while we were together he shot some photos of me. But even though we remain friendly, I’m uncomfortable asking to see them, assuming he even still has any. I suppose I’m afraid those photos might not be flattering.

***

My departure from my marriage began with a terrible conversation on August 9th, 1992, at the end of which, my ex terrified me by punching a wall and putting his hand through it. He was angry that I’d finally brought up what had been bubbling up beneath the surface and causing so much tension: my unhappiness, my need for space, my hope that we’d go to couples therapy.

It was a conversation I’d been putting off for months, and now viscerally could no longer avoid. The truth seemed to be fighting its way out of my body. For so long I’d been pausing and thinking for a minute or two before I uttered a single thought, for fear of what might come out of my mouth. His reaction let me know I’d been right to be afraid.

A part of me had broken, though, the part of me that could fake contentedness. Something had to give, and it finally did. It had been a long time coming.

***

A year before, in August of ‘91, after an airline lost his luggage on a return flight from a business trip, my ex went missing for several hours. He’d called from a payphone around 8pm to say he was dealing with the lost luggage at baggage claim, and he promised to call again once it all got sorted. But then he didn’t call again. There were no more calls.

His father, who worked with him, kept calling our apartment to see if I’d heard from him again, or if he’d shown up. When it got to be 10:30 and my ex was still unaccounted for, his father decided to drive various routes between LaGuardia and our Long Island apartment, to see if he might be in distress on the side of the road. At midnight his father came to our apartment, alone. At 12:30am, my mother and stepfather arrived. Together we paced the apartment, and waited for some dreadful call.

When my ex finally arrived home at 2:30am, sloppy-drunk, he told me, snottily, that he’d been out at a bar with a flight attendant whose luggage had also been lost. He said this not knowing his father and my parents were within earshot in our bedroom, overhearing him slurring his words and being nasty toward me. His father gave him shit about it, and then, after everyone else left, my ex gave me shit for the array of parents he’d found in our place, even though I hadn’t asked for any of them to come.

He was annoyed that I was upset, so I simply decided to not be upset. I did what I always used to: I froze, then tried to pretend it hadn’t happened—just as I had the two times I found condoms on him, a birth control method we’d never used since throughout our relationship I was on the pill to treat my endometriosis.

For a few months after The Stewardess Incident I was able to hold it together and pretend. But then, in January of 1992, my ex went on a three-week business trip, and wouldn’t tell me what hotels he’d be staying at, so that I might reach him if I needed to. No, he’d call me, as per usual, when he had time. He traveled about half the year, but usually a week or less at a time. A three-week clip was much longer than we’d ever been apart.

In that time, I had something resembling a nervous breakdown. I sunk into a deep depression, rarely showering or leaving our apartment. The reality I’d been suppressing threatened to enter my consciousness. Not knowing what to do with that information—desperately wishing I didn’t have to do anything with it—I put myself in a dark, stagnant place, a cocoon I hoped I’d never need to emerge from. Being depressed felt safer than being angry, or making any kind of move that might upend my life.

***

A few friends begged me to find a therapist, and eventually I did—in the city. I wanted to have a reason to travel to Manhattan again, and there, in my new shrink’s West 56th Street office, the truth began to spill out of me. Not at my first appointment; that day I outright lied, to my therapist and to myself, and said that the only good thing in my life was my marriage.

But over time I started to face up to reality. With each 55-minute session (for which I traveled over two hours roundtrip, on the LIRR and subway), I revealed more. The more I unloaded on the therapy couch, the less I could hide from myself and my ex at home.

That sparked an incredibly uncomfortable seven or eight months between us. I found it harder and harder to front. I didn’t know how to disagree or stand up for myself in a way that wasn’t harsh or explosive. In hindsight, after so much hiding and managing my emotions, maybe that was for the best.

I know that what it led to was for the best. But I still feel bad about the way I handled myself. I wasn’t the best version of me. Then again, at 26-and-change, who is?

***

What was good about those early city days was how much I loved living there. I walked or jogged through Central Park most mornings. I went all the time to movies and museums, and now and then to events I got to cover at Lincoln Center. I liked to bring a book to Cafe La Fortuna, on West 71st Street, or Cafe Mozart on West 70th, and drink cappuccinos while I read and people-watched with classical music playing in the background. I spent way too much money eating out at restaurants, and taking out from them, too. But the sheer number of choices—places to go, things to eat, culture to inhale, people to observe—it all made me feel alive in a way I hadn't in my “starter marriage” on Long Island.

I went back to working in a newsroom after a few years of freelancing from home in Long Beach, and that also gave me life. I miss newsrooms, filled with smart people buzzing about, all working together to put out the next day’s paper.

Every day there was so much for me to discover in my new world, at work, and at play. When presented options, I often chose wrong, especially when it came to men. There were many elusive ones, who went in and out of my life erratically—and dramatically. So much drama in those days. Through all that relationship chaos, I came to think of the city itself as something like my significant other.

***

Sometimes I reflect back to a night when I was newly settled in on West 74th Street. Now 27, I was adjusting to being single after having married my college sweetheart, the second man I’d ever dated.

I had no idea how to behave like an unattached person. I’d been attached, to one of two boyfriends, since I was 15. In an effort to start feeling less awkward about it, I took myself out to Bear Bar on Amsterdam Avenue. I sat on a stool, nursing a grapefruit-and-seltzer, while observing the people around me as they effortlessly kibbitzed and flirted with one another.

Would I ever be able to socialize the way they did, I wondered, with such ease? Would I ever be comfortable as a single woman, alone at a bar? Or would I always feel more like an anthropologist in such situations?

Welcome to the new “Adventures in Divorce” section…

I’d nearly forgotten what a transgression it had been for me to leave my first marriage a few months shy of 27, then move to the city to live all by myself and become something of an art monster.

Well, an art monster with a demanding day job. But someone who was now liberated from suffocating suburban marital ennui (and futile fertility treatment) with a person I’d met at 19 and could no longer relate to, nor get along with, who was not supportive of my creative work or my desire to pursue an MFA. Now I was free to write—to allot for my own work whatever extra-curricular time I could eke out to work on Adventures in Divorce, initially fiction, later on a memoir, connecting the dots between the damage from my parents’ divorce and my choices to marry too young, then end my marriage.

Scandalous! I was shunned—particularly by some married friends and acquaintances, who acted as if I had a sickness that might be catching. And that was before my ex got sick, six months later.

I was recently reminded of my status as the Hester Prynne of south shore Long Island when I found myself in a social situation with a group of women I hadn’t seen in many years. They’d grown up with my ex, and revered him. It was unimaginable to them that I’d dare to walk away from him, and more generally, from the straight-and-narrow—the settled married life I’d entered at the clueless, barely-formed age of 23-and-change. The same life path they’d all embarked on around the same time, and currently still adhere to.

On the rare occasions I encounter these women, I notice a series of expressions come across their faces, which I perceive as: Oh, shit. It’s her. I guess I should say hi…? I always save them the trouble and say hi first. It’s pleasant enough, tolerable for a one-minute catch-up. But it reliably leaves me feeling awful—judged, and self-conscious.

It’s occurred to me that maybe they aren’t judging me. Maybe it’s my own projection. This week’s Questionnaire, featuring Griffin Hansbury, aka Jeremiah Moss, included a response that really resonated for me, even though I am not trans or queer, just someone who was drawn to an alternate path, which sometimes makes me feel like I’ve failed:

I find it useful to think of Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of “chrononormativity,” which describes the way that capitalism and patriarchy convince us that there’s a right way to progress through life and that way maximizes productivity and reproductivity. Queer and trans people are often outside of that, but we also measure ourselves against it and that can feel like failure. At the same time, there’s a tremendous liberation to being out-of-sync with what is normal. You have more space to do what you want with your life.

But this time something weird happened that made me think the judgment isn’t all in my head.

While I was off talking to someone else, one of the women approached Brian—perhaps not realizing he was my current husband?—and told him a story about me, how I’d left “Elliott” (as I call my ex in my book), and then he fell ill. She was sharing this scandalous anecdote with the person I am now married to, and she had boiled it down to what sounded like cause-and-effect. Selfish Sari asked for a divorce —> Elliott got sick.

It’s true. Six months after we got separated, my ex developed a serious illness. Over decades I’ve come around to realizing you can’t give someone a congenital disease by breaking up with them—by realizing you’re living the wrong life and making a big, difficult change before you further commit, thankfully before there are children in the picture and it becomes even harder to do, potentially putting more people’s emotional wellbeing at risk. But at the time, I believed it was my fault.

It was enough to make me run back. After being informed by friends, I hated myself. I sobbed uncontrollably, then pulled myself together enough to make a call to Elliott in the hospital.

My father-in-law picked up.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I wish for you whatever you wish for yourself. But don’t you ever call him again.”

Click.

I was shattered. I could barely function for months. I spoke to an older cousin about it. I told her that in my mind, this was all a sign that I was a terrible person, and wrong to leave.

“Or,” she suggested, “maybe you can view it as a sign that you got out just in time. If you’d waited six more months, you’d have never had the courage to go—to be honest about your unhappiness and start your life over. You would have felt stuck forever.”

She made me realize my father-in-law had done me a favor. He’d eliminated whatever ambiguity remained about our possible future together. Ours was no longer a “trial” separation. We were headed for a capital D divorce.

In other news…

• If you’re in the mid-Hudson Valley, come hear me talk with Susan Ito about her excellent adoptee memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere next Weds., 4/17 at 6pm at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck.

The current boom in women’s divorce memoirs has triggered all sorts of feelings in me, among them long dormant regret and shame about the one I shelved.

Long before there was Adventures in *Journalism* there was Adventures in Divorce, the divorce memoir I struggled to find the courage to write and publish in my mid-30s. (At 26 I left the marriage I’d entered at 23.)

It was a project through which I primarily tried to understand two things: 1) whether I (and by extension my Gen X cohort, many of whom were in similar shoes), had been doomed to fail at marriage by my family’s legacy of divorce (my step-parents have step-parents), and 2) how awkward it felt to derive such relief, freedom, and optimism from a legal act of my own that matched the one I still condemned my parents for.

Being a child of divorce, or “divorce kid” as my cohort referred to ourselves in the ‘70s, spurred an assortment of life-long struggles for me, beginning the day my parents informed me they were entering a trial separation—after which my mother tried to sell the change in my family’s status as an “adventure” we might actually enjoy—and ending, well, never. At 58 I still deal with thorny blended-family issues, and worse, emotional turmoil, both old and new. It’s all tied directly to that painful night in 1976 and its assorted regrettable, messy aftermaths.

I worked on the book on and off for years. (It took a long time because I was working full-time as a reporter and editor, but also because it was scary.) Occasionally I took an alternate tack and attempted it as fiction. Actually, I’d started it as fiction in the early 90s, when I dabbled in, then dropped out of, two MFA programs. Ultimately it felt more organic to write it as memoir, or a memoir-in-essays. But revealing so much about myself and others, at our worst no less, was terrifying.

I got so far as completing a rough proposal draft with a couple of sample chapters that my agent at the time was waiting for me to revise, and publishing a few fairly visible personal essays about different aspects of that experience. One appeared in the January, 2000 issue of Marie Claire, in tandem with another by Catherine Texier under the heading, “Suddenly Single.”

But after my ex-husband had his lawyer send me a cease-and-desist letter in response to the Marie Claire piece, over a stupid, throw-away line I hadn’t even written—an editor added it and insisted it stay in—I started losing my nerve. It was the first time I’d been called out for oversharing, and the beginning of a long quest for the most ethical way to write about others in memoir and personal essays.

The line in question was utterly ridiculous. (One of my favorite things about that awful Marie Claire essay is that it doesn’t exist online, so no one can read it unless they, like, go to the periodical room in a major library and find it in print or on microfiche.) I had written that as I became more free-spirited and liberal in my thinking, my ex had become more uptight and conservative. I wasn’t talking about politics per se, I was talking about our attitudes about everything evolving in opposite directions.

Glenda Bailey, then the editor-in-chief, changed the line to read: “As I became more like Maureen Dowd, he became more like Newt Gingrich.” When my editor brought that back to me, I laughed out loud and said that wasn’t at all what I meant. She said she couldn’t change it, and I was shocked. It had nothing to do with me or my ex or our marriage. It made absolutely no sense! I begged her to remove it. She called me back and told me, “Glenda says it’s a deal-breaker. That line stays in, or the essay gets pulled.”

My agent went to bat for me, but to no avail. The essay would be published with that dumb line, or it wouldn’t be published at all. There were other editing choices I objected to, also to no avail. I felt stuck.

When I look back at my choice to go forward with publishing the essay as is, I gag. Ugh, I was so desperate for that highly visible byline. I believed it would help me land a book deal, and that if I didn’t take that chance, I’d never be offered another. I often wonder whether, put in the same situation today, I’d have the balls to choose differently. I’d like to believe I would. (Lord knows I’ve grudgingly compromised on other edits since then, but none as bad as the ones in that stupid Marie Claire essay. This is part of why I became determined to be a more collaborative editor myself.)

Needless to say, my ex was deeply offended by that line—so I learned from his lawyer’s cease-and-desist letter. I didn’t blame him. It made me I realize that an essay about my experience landing on Planet Single at 26 after divorcing the second person I ever dated didn’t need to include the story of why my marriage broke up. All readers needed to know was that it did, which led me to my first awkward experiences of dating as an adult.

But I also realized that if I was going to go further toward publishing a memoir, I’d have to write in detail about—and make greater meaning of—what had happened between us. After receiving the lawyer’s letter, I wasn’t so sure I was up to the task.

I did continue to publish short divorce-related pieces here and there—for example, a reported personal essay for a January, 2004 issue of Time Out NY on divorce ceremonies along the lines of Jewish “get” I’d participated in with my ex, before a rabbinic court, and my first of two Modern Love essays, in which I didn’t reveal too much about my ex, but totally (regrettably) overshared about my parents’ marriage and divorce.

But ultimately I abandoned the project. At the time it felt like failure, and I’ve carried a lot of that with me. But in hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t go through with that memoir then. My philosophy on fairness in writing about other people has evolved significantly since then. There is a piece in my memoir about my first marriage and divorce, but I wrote it after arriving at an entirely new understanding of what that marriage and divorce were about. It’s all so different from what I thought before. And I blurred my ex to the point that, unless you were someone who knew us back then, and the details of what had gone down, you wouldn’t be able to recognize him. I feel good about that choice.

All the current talk about divorce has sparked new thoughts about my own—and my parents’, and about marriage and divorce in general. I’m realizing I might have new things to say about it all. (What’s more, now that I’ve been happily married for 19 years the second time around, I’m pretty sure it’s not the case that I’m doomed to keep repeating my parents’ failure.)

It’s been over 32 years since I left my first marriage; I believe my perspective and motives for writing are much more sound than they were all those years ago. I trust myself more now, and that makes me less afraid.