"Adventures in Divorce"

What kept me from going forward with the divorce memoir I was writing in my 30s, and how differently I'd approach it now.

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.

This note was at the bottom of my Marie Claire essay.

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.

My Time Out NY essay.

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.