Transcript: Kat Rosenfield

My conversation with the American novelist, podcaster and cultural critic

This summer, the glamorization of divorce has reached its apex. There are divorce rings, divorce parties, divorce albums, and divorce memoirs — all portraying the act of walking away from a marriage as inherently empowering for women. But my guest on today’s program argues that so much of the current divorce discourse is just narcissism disguised as feminism. 

Kat Rosenfield is an American novelist, cultural critic, and podcaster – and a columnist for The Free Press. Today, we discuss her essay for the online outlet, titled “Does Divorce Make You Hotter?”

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: I’m excited to have you on today to have this conversation about the glamorization of divorce — this divorce-as-empowerment narrative — that is dominant in pop culture right now.

KR: Yes. I noticed this emerging in my personal life before I really identified it in the culture. A few years ago, all of my friends in one part of my social circle just all of a sudden decided en masse to divorce their husbands, kind of recreationally. At the time it seemed, even to me, like it was a very glamorous thing to do. And then I took a pause and was like, “Well, I like my husband, I'm going to keep him.” But nevertheless, there was this very best-life-living enthusiasm surrounding the entire enterprise that I thought at the time was very interesting. And now I see it everywhere in the culture.

TH: It's so true. I've been tracking this for a while as well. We saw it with Adele's divorce album and the merchandise she sold. Then, essays like Lara Bazelon in The New York Times titled “Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love.” Now, I like Lara Bazelon’s work, just not this particular essay.

KR: Same.

TH: This summer, we seem to have arrived at a new high point for the obsession around divorce. There's the divorce ring, the divorce party, the divorce album, the divorce essay — and this summer is being heralded as the summer of the divorce memoir. You, of course, wrote about this in an excellent piece for The Free Press titled “Does Divorce Make You Hotter”? There's a lot of threads to pull here. Let's start with this reframing of what is a painful moment in most people's lives, often with catastrophic financial and emotional consequences, as some kind of feminist liberation. You look at the book, This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz. I have read that one as well. Tell me how that book encapsulates this particular trend.

KR: I think there are two interesting things happening with Lyz Lenz’s book. One is that the book fits into this “political polarization of everything” that is happening right now, where things that are just basic human experiences, or not in any way overtly political, become coded nevertheless as either Republican or Democrat, or left or right wing, purely because of vibes. So, for her memoir, it's “divorce is feminist, hence empowering and hence it's liberal, hence it's left-coded.” And by converse, then, to stay together, to try to make a marriage work, it must be in some way Republican, or conservative, in the same way that drinking raw milk or watching Yellowstone is. So, there is that element of it. 

But the other thing, yes, is the idea that divorce is feminist and hence empowering. I think that this is part of a broader cultural trend in which we're really bad at coping with the idea of women having regrets, of women having negative experiences. And of women as being fully empowered, but that empowerment sometimes leads to the entire spectrum of experiences, some of which are negative. Sometimes when you have agency, you make choices and sometimes those choices are bad. They don't turn out the way you wanted them to.

I get this sense, and I address this in the piece, that I think we're at this kind of apotheosis of trying to “yass queen” away all of our bad feelings about anything. There's no experience so negative or so painful that you can't spin it around and say, “Actually, this was the path to my ultimate empowerment and to living my best life. So, it was a good thing, actually.”

TH: It’s interesting with that memoir, I had the feeling reading it that it was almost at times like reading political propaganda as opposed to any kind of art. There were moments that she broke through that. Near the end of the book, she's sitting on her porch, drinking tea and [describing] the specifics of her life and what she was looking for in her life. But until that point, there's just so much universalizing of her particular bad marriage — which does sound like it was not a great marriage — and this indictment of marriage as a whole, as an institution. There's a lot of sloganeering. What did you make of that element of the book?

KR: What you identify as the sloganeering is really about getting people on board with this as a cause. Which is very interesting. Because it starts out as, “This was my personal thing that I did, that I found empowering.” Even though Lenz kind of says that she doesn't want to encourage everybody to leave their husbands, it's very apparent from the book that this is actually sort of her goal. I wondered as I was looking at it: How much of this is actual, genuine conviction that this is a salient political thing, that this is something that everybody should be doing for the common good, or for the good of women, and how much of it was almost a misery-loves-company effect happening? You do get the sense that she is seeking affirmation that her choice was good by recruiting people into making that same choice.

TH: That's interesting. There's a very old narrative playing out here when she writes, “I didn't want to waste my one wild and precious life telling a grown man where to find the ketchup in the fridge.” This griping constantly about men not doing enough around the house, I have thought about this narrative a lot. It doesn't ring true to me at all. The men in my extended family, and the man I'm in a relationship with, do a lot. I wonder if this is an old, rehearsed Boomer feminist trope, and maybe we're already outgrowing it. What do you think?

KR: I think to a certain extent, yeah. I mean, you can see how it's become this target that everyone aims to hit. This has been the case for a few years. Before the boom of divorce memoirs, there was the breakup essay, which was a genre unto itself and which really tread a lot of the same territory as this. You have people saying, “I have broken up with my boyfriend and this is great. This is a great thing because now I'm empowered. And also, he was a bastard and he was never supportive of me, in these very specifically unfeminist ways. He was threatened by my success. He never did anything around the house.” 

I think that there are certain things that are universal to the experience of marriage. The inability of men to find ketchup in the fridge, even when it's right in front of their face, is something that — just based on anecdotal evidence, personal experience, a survey of all my friends — this does appear to be a common theme. [Laughs] But I don't think it's a catastrophe. I don't think that it says anything particularly bigger or broader about the nature of relationships between men and women. It might say something about the relative heights of men and women, where you tend to put something away at a place that is not eye level for somebody who's taller than you. 

But anyway, it is true that there was — and I think this really dates back more to 2010s feminism, or early aughts feminism — that it became a very big thing to talk about the mental load of the household and the burden of being the manager of the household. One of the things that always comes up is the soap dispenser: “My husband thinks the soap dispenser just magically refills, because fairies come and do it. I've been doing it and nobody appreciates my soap dispenser refilling labour. And you can extrapolate this out to the broader plight of women everywhere. This is a feminist issue.”

On the one hand, it resonates in a certain way because people have had that experience, yes. But on the other hand, it is a bit of a dead horse. And it always did overlook the fact that people gravitate towards doing different tasks in a household. Sometimes you have a person who tends to notice things like you're running out of toilet paper, you're running out of soap, that type of thing. Then you have somebody whose sphere of observation is elsewhere. And it ends up balancing out, for the most part. That was a bit of a tear, sorry. 

TH: I also wanted to just touch on another one of the big divorce memoirs recently written, Splinters by Leslie Jamison. I found that book pretty compelling. Part of it was because it demonstrated what I think you've called in the past, on your podcast, “the fullness of human experience.” And part of it was because it touched on the death of the dream of a family and acknowledged her daily struggles to parent alone after leaving. Now, I know critics of your Free Press essay pointed out that you didn't talk about the toll of divorce on children. One essay obviously can't do everything. But as you said on your own podcast, Feminine Chaos, the erasure of children in these narratives is often the norm for the divorce empowerment genre. Walk us through your thinking on that.

KR: I think that the impact on children of divorce, as a broader topic, is something absolutely worth discussing. It should be a part of any discussion of that, if you're talking about the broader topic. What I've identified here is more the cultural narrative that emerges around divorce for women as empowering. It is true that in the course of doing that — and I think it's a feature not a bug of this type of narrative — that they don't talk about children. And if they do, it's only in the briefest of ways. And always framed in this very particular way: “Isn't it better for the kids to see their mother living her best life, not tied to a marriage that wasn't really fulfilling to her?” I think people can disagree on whether that's the case. It's a conversation worth having. But that wasn't what I was trying to circle in my essay, and I don't think that the memoirs in question or the essays in question really address it to anyone's satisfaction either.

TH: Our fellow podcaster, Bridget Phetasy, in her recent article in The Spectator, about the effect of divorce on children, was the first one that I'd really seen that hit that on a very poignant note. What did you make of that essay?

KR: It was so searing, and a brutal read. I am lucky that my parents are still together and I don't have children. But if I did, I'm also still with my husband. So, I don't feel like this is super personally salient. But it was interesting to see the perspective of somebody who's in middle age now, who has a daughter of her own and who is painting this picture of a divorce having such a longer tail on it than anybody thinks about. It really just goes on and on. The effects of it never stop. 

She is in middle age, she is trying to shuttle her kids around to four different sets of grandparents. Each of whom wants to lay claim to their grandchild. None of whom are willing to cooperate with each other, or suffer discomfort in any way in order to make her life easier. And this is just more of the same, right? It's a microcosm for her experience as a child, when her parents decided to split up and then became more involved with their respective new significant others than they were in parenting their kids.

TH: These things do have a long tail, and it doesn't get talked about enough. So, I loved seeing that essay from Bridget. I also wanted to talk about the class element of this conversation. There's something that does make me feel a bit uncomfortable, from a class perspective, about all of these essays. I think Jessa Crispin said it really well on her Substack: “In our time of wild income inequality, even marriage has become a luxury item that most cannot afford.” It is true that marriage is collapsing in the working classes, and it's the elites that tend to stay married. But these essays come from elite discourse. How do we resolve that tension?