"Remembering the original ex-wife" with Marsha Gordon

Thank you to everyone listening and sharing this podcast! In our first five weeks, we’ve gotten over 33,000 downloads! Zach, my producer, and I are just floored!

Okay, now let’s get to the show…

As the stock market crashed in 1929, Ursula Parrot released her novel Ex-Wife. In it, the protagonist darts between the experience of sexual liberation and the ever-present sense of loss from her marriage. It feels at once familiar and refreshingly new. Parrot’s biographer Marsha Gordon asks why a century later women still have an uneasy relationship with the label ex-wife.

We also talk about Parrott’s exciting, scandalous, and fabulous life, of liberation, fear, and ex-wifery.

If you like what you hear, preorder This American Ex-Wife the book!

Show notes:

• Read Marsha Gordon’s fascinating biography Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott.

• Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott is passionate, fascinating, wonderfully, and heart-achingly written.

• This American Ex-Wife is hosted by Lyz Lenz (@LyzLenz) and produced by Zachary Oren Smith (@ZachOSmith). Illustration by Alessandro Gottardo. Show art by Suzanne Glémot (@tape_remover).

Here the three of us are talking! Notice Zach is trying his best to ham it up, but the mustache is SERIOUS.