Hot Divorcée Summer
A manifesto for a summer of burning it down
I published a version of this essay in my newsletter in 2021 and, in hindsight, maybe I published it a bit too early. I thought of it this year after reading essay after essay about women breaking. And book after book about the same thing.
So, because I am traveling this week, I thought I’d republish it slightly altered, of course. If you are in LA and want to see me, you can still sign up for my events in Studio City and Bel Air!
So many new books explore the subject of women who’ve hit their limit. First there was More, Molly Roden Winter’s fascinating look at her journey into polyamory to vent her anger at her marriage. Then, in February, Leslie Jamison and I published two very different books about divorce. Both books became bestsellers. Miranda July’s new novel is about a middle-aged woman whose life is coming apart so is Ali Wong’s new stand-up. Sociologist Jessica Calarco has a new book about how American women are breaking. And Sarah Manguso’s new novel Liars, is about the unraveling of one woman’s marriage; so is Scaachi Koul’s forthcoming memoir.
You can tell women are shattering by the amount of effort politicians and pundits are putting into forcing them back together. They’re trying to legislate what constitutes a woman. They want women to get married. They want to end no-fault divorce. And to force pregnant women to stay with their husbands.
But the breaking isn’t just happening on a personal level. It’s happening nationally, as students protest their universities' investments in the war machine. Demands to divest from the machinations and industries that support violence are another kind of breaking.
Even the orcas have had enough.
Actually, let me rephrase. We are not breaking; we are just responding to the brokenness all around us. If we’ve lived through the past four years, we’ve experienced unimaginable loss. Loss of our jobs and our friends or parents or grandparents. The nation’s capital was under attack. Remember that? Airlines got huge bailouts, while our nation’s mothers are being forced from the workforce. And this is just the highlight reel. We are burned out, overloaded, overworked, and under showered.
Sorry to quote myself, but let me just quote myself from something I wrote for Rolling Stone:
Every woman my age I know is exhausted from managing children, unequal partnerships, aging parents, the erosion of our rights, careers where pay gaps still exist, and there is no girlbossing our way out of them. Over the past decade, we voted. Pantsuitted. Pussy hatted. #MeToo-ed. Shouted our abortions. All to end up here, in 2024, in this Temu-brand 2016 redux. It’s enough to make any woman commit an (alleged) murder or walk into the sea.
This is not a summer of pretending things are fine. Of going back to normal. This is the summer of calling this shit out. Of saying it’s not okay. Of standing up for ourselves. Of nuking our lives. Of breaking them down. Of letting go. Of refusing to hold it all together. Of refusing to smile and say, “He helps; he picked up dinner the other night.” When you and I both know he left a stack of dishes in the sink for you to figure out, even though you had two Zoom meetings and inexplicably it was dress-like-a-penguin day for online school. No. We are done with that. And it ends now.
I am not suggesting that you, personally, get a divorce. Although maybe you want to. In that case, I do suggest you get a divorce. Rather, what I am saying is this is the summer of breaking. Of burning. Of shouting and yelling and divesting. Letting it all go. What we are letting go of is the bad relationships, the bad jobs, the bad year, and the patriarchy. This is a time of having the courage to imagine something different.
Let me tell you what I mean. Two years ago, I went to a cocktail tasting in my town. And there I saw the mayor, who had failed to respond to a natural disaster in my town that left people homeless. I saw a businessman who, last summer, got outed for donning blackface. I saw an ex of mine who runs a restaurant that violated mask mandates. I smiled at all of them and gave them the finger while sipping bourbon. I laughed with my friend as we remembered the last time we’d gone to this same event. Then, three years ago, I’d hidden under a table to avoid my old pastor, my divorce mediator, and two Tinder mistakes.
Now, there was no more hiding. I would take up space. I would smile. I would drink. I would wear a low-cut top and hug my friends. I would make a joke about nuts and say, “That’s what she said” very loudly. I would not care.
We are back in the world, but the world can go to hell.
We talk about breaking as if it’s a failure. As if our endings and refusals and hard “nos” are something to apologize for. But every woman I know has said that her endings were a relief, a joy, a weight lifted off her shoulders.
So, this is the summer of quitting the things that don’t serve you. The summer of decentering the expectations of culture and doing what you want to do, whether that’s join a knitting group, or become a bog witch. It’s the summer of caring a lot, but not giving any fucks. It’s the summer of gentle ministrations to your soft body of survival. It’s the summer of grief and joy. A summer of knowing all we’ve lost but knowing how much more we have to live.
College campuses are filled with protestors calling for systemic breaking. Our books our filled with personal breaking. It’s only going to get more intense as the weather heats up and we get closer to the election.
Last night a woman told me she wasn’t divorcing, but she was going to start living like she had 50/50 custody. “I’m sick of constantly negotiating for my freedom. I’m done,” she said. “I’m just taking it.”
So, it’s the summer of letting it all out. Of being a public mess. Of loud revenge. Of drinks with friends on the porch. Of crying to Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, and blasting “Gaslighter” from the speakers of your minivan. Don’t have a minivan? Well, you do have one, spiritually.
There are no rules anymore. Wear your leggings. Or don a dress with a sexy cut-out. Two pieces? Whatever. You are sexy. So just do it. Bare the soft curves of your body that held all the Doritos and late-night wine. The body that kept you alive. You are alive.
My book makes an amazing wedding shower gift.
Also, last year, I wrote about the summer of the whales.
Oh, how I could have used this about 10 years ago, when I was still in the thick of my divorce and drowning in bills and kids and WTF. Now I'm not drowning anymore. I don't put up with men's bullshit (in my personal life, anyway). I have ascended again (barely) into the middle class and just maintaining that reality while also having any kind of creative focus takes everything.
So the fucks are few and far between and I don't feel bad about it. Instead, I feel largely outside of society's expectations of women because I don't have the energy for them (Not trying to get married again helps with that, too.). So, I'll simply say, Welcome to the party, ladies. It's more work than I'd like, but it's better than whatever that shit was before.
Hear hear. As an adult, I watched my mom be miserable most of the time in her marriage. Around the time she might have had the inclination to get a divorce, finally, my father's health began to falter, and she, in good conscience, couldn't leave. But the morning he died, I was there with her and one of my brothers. (We had been there, awake, all night, waiting.) My brother cried. I didn't. She didn't. My father donated his body to science (my mom's suggestion, as that's what she's going to do, and he could never make up his mind about what he wanted), so we waited for the representative from the medical school to arrive. When it was time to go, she put her hand on his chest and said, "Goodbye, Fred." And we left. That was it. It was so simple and yet so striking to see a woman who had spent nearly 57 years of her life with this other person experience, upon his death, relief.
She's never cried over his death.
Men, seems you might want to participate in your marriages in such ways that your wives' primary emotion upon your death isn't *relief.
Later: I'll add that I appreciate that men would rather not [ insert whatever thing ]. No shit, dude. I would rather not do the dishes, run the errands, do the laundry, cut the grass, book the appointments, cook the meals, etc. But most of us do not live, nor have our ancestors ever lived, in the age of servants. I used to tell my mom that she and my father should trade lives for a week. There is *no way* he would have been able to do all that she did. He took so much for granted. From the moment he woke up, everything he needed was available to him because of her. He wakes up in his bed. He's in their home. Did he make sure the mortgage payment got paid every month? Nope, that was her. Did he pay the electric bill every month? Nope. The water bill? Nope. Did he buy the mattress and all the bedding? Nope. Did he buy his underwear? OK, maybe that. Did he buy his toothbrush, the toothpaste, the shaving cream, the razor? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. Did he buy the towel hanging by the sink? Did he wash it and dry it and hang it there?
You get the point. She did almost everything. He cut the grass. Sometimes he emptied the garbage. A guy at their house for dinner once commented on my father doing the grilling. Nope, Mom did that, too. He didn't even do most of the "guy" stuff. That fell to my eldest brother.