This Is Dedicated To Anyone Who Ever Left

A conversation with Kelly McMasters about her book The Leaving Season

Kelly McMaster’s memoir The Leaving Season is dedicated to the leavers — the people who pack up and end the versions of their life they have been given or have even chosen and move on to something else. It is also a book about how the people and places we love can be our undoing. 

She begins with the story of her relationship and building a life together with her husband. Then, she shows the reader how that life came apart. It’s a book told with granular detail that doesn’t shy away from hard truths and ever harder kinds of love. 

In one passage she writes:

One night near the end of our marriage, while making dinner, I took my engagement and wedding rings off and placed them on the windowsill above the kitchen sink before plunging my hands into a bowl of cold raw meat. After dinner, I washed the dishes, lining them up in the dry rack while staring out over the hill. That night, I did not put the rings back on.

This is how a marriage ends. Slowly, piece by piece, and then all at once.

I talked to Kelly about her memoir, about breaking, and about how she writes the people and places she left. This interview was edited for length and clarity. You can buy Kelly’s book from your local bookstore or right here.

Lyz Lenz: There are a lot of little things that lead up to a divorce, but what was the moment when you broke in your marriage?

Kelly McMasters: “Break” feels like a snap. For me, it was a wearing down. I remember walking. I had this gorgeous view and this really beautiful bucolic landscape out in front of my house in northeast Pennsylvania. It was where I felt where I got my comfort. I was taking this walk and I got no comfort that day. I lay out on the ground — I [can] still remember the bristly feel of the dry grass.

I remember realizing I might not be able to get up. I was so worn down. What I've heard from a lot of other women, too, is this feeling when you say, I feel like I might die. That sounds like hyperbole, but you're just so ground down… I had to make a choice between surrendering and getting back up. 

Instead of a break, it was a resurgence. I wasn't healed, but I was standing up, getting stronger. I remember that moment as understanding that I had a decision to make. I had to either decide to die, not physically — although it did feel like that at the time — rather, it was a psychic death. I was either going to give up completely or get the fuck up.

I think I broke but didn't realize I had broken. Later I allowed myself to break. The first, the initial moment when I knew something was wrong but I hadn't accepted that leaving was the end result, I knew I was just living with so much fear all the time. I knew we needed help. I actually wrote everything down how I felt so I could see it in black and white. Ending the silence is the first step of that break.

Lyz: Your book reads as a love letter to rural America. But there is also a tension, because while you may love these places, they don’t always love you back.

Kelly: There was a part of me that felt very comfortable when my ex and I first moved to rural Pennsylvania. I recognized these are my old neighbors. I feel comfortable and respect that they can fix anything that comes into their barn. When we did get to know each other, their sense of reverence for their animals, for their land, for their mother, things like that really meant something and were beautiful.

And yet as a woman, there were certain lines that I could not cross. That was new to me and very frustrating. It was clear that I couldn't fully be myself, so the relationships could only go so far.

There's the Hollywood version of the country. There's the New York Times version of the country. And then there's the actual country. I think for me, that was the main difference, that this was not an experiment; this was our home. Now the Trump flags are everywhere, but this was pre-Trump, so there wasn't that going down the street and identifying, oh, this is a safe space; this is not.

Lyz: How do you write about that, the things that you love but that trap you? How do you write about it with honesty, without being condescending and judgmental? Because I think you did it. 

Kelly: I think certainly required multiple drafts — this is the extra-kind draft, this is the false draft, this is the pissed-off draft — and then Frankensteining them together. But one thing that I think might be an important note is I left. 

I have not just the critical distance of years, but the geographic distance of remembering.  I remember the first little house I grew up in. For the first few years of my life, we were moving around every six months and moving from a ski mountain where my dad would make snow and do EMS. But one year we got this little house. My mom and I were there. There was a potbelly stove. The house was right up against this cliff. It was just really remote and in the woods. It was beautiful. 

I was talking about it once and my parents pulled out a picture of it. My mom was like, "First of all, that potbelly stove gave you asthma and it was hell as a mom to sit up with you every night. That stove was our only source of heat. We couldn't turn it off, but you were hacking your lungs out. Here's the house. It was this dumpy little yellow single-wide trailer. It was not this Snow White cabin."

But in my mind, because I can't ever return there, that's what it will always be. Having been exiled from Eden with the choices that I made, I can return but I can't ever actually go back. 

I think that has a lot to do with being able to modulate between nostalgia, memory, truth. I did a lot of reporting for things that I can't remember … but I think that's a really important distinction, that I am not there anymore.

Lyz:  You have an essay in the book where you talk about someone calling Child Protective Services on you. I think specifically when you write about a marriage, getting at the truth of what happened is so difficult. I think two people can walk away from marriage not even knowing what actually happened

Kelly: I think for a period I would write these drafts where I was mostly concerned about protecting my ex.

Because there is and still is a lot to love about him and the way that he loves his children, and yet I can never understand the choices that he made in that situation. “Understand” — this is the right word. There's that part, thinking about his potential response if he ever reads it. I don't know that he would agree with my interpretation, but I think he would agree with the scenes that I built and see himself there. And then I had to rewrite it thinking about my children reading it, imagining [them] more in their 20s.

But in the actual writing, any time something started breaking down and I would feel weird on the page, it was often … where I was inserting myself, my opinion, maybe saying what I thought other people were thinking, all of those boundaries that really were important for me not to cross. I think that it was really hard to walk that line in storytelling. I had to tell myself, this is my job. I'm a nonfiction writer. And yes, it might be really hard for my kids at some points, the fact that their mom's a nonfiction writer, but a lot of moms have jobs that are hard on their kids. This is just the way that mine is.

Lyz: I both respect and resent the burden of that because people expect memoirs written by mothers to grapple with and answer questions about their children. I think these questions are essential, but I also resent being asked them because the male memoirist who's writing about his children is not being asked, "Do you think you're exploiting your children for content?" So, yes, that is an essential ethical consideration for memoirists, and I think we should weigh these things. But fuck you for asking it.

Kelly: Well, and also fuck you for thinking I haven't considered it.

Lyz: Right? I’m actually a really good mother. But also …I don't owe you that. The only people I have to prove that to are my own children. That's a private thing. Still, when you reveal that interiority on the page, you open yourself up to questions that I think are important for the writing process, but maybe not. What's the answer here, Kelly? 

Kelly: I wish I knew. The other question that I get a lot that annoys me is, "Well, why didn't you just write a novel?"

Lyz: During the many years we were in couples therapy my ex really didn't like what I wrote. And he kept being like, "Why can't you just write a novel?" I was like, “If I could be Stephen King, I would be. I think we all would be. But I am not. So I just have to be Lyz. Isn't that good enough?” Kelly, why didn't you write this as a novel?

Kelly: Oh my God. I don't think half of it would be believable. If I wrote a short story with a rural setting where farmers down the road named a cow after me. What? No, that's a terrible short story. Nobody's going to believe that. What I've noticed — with this book, anyway — is the power of knowing that it's true is unlocked. I got the most beautiful email from Abigail Thomas, who's a goddess in my mind. She said, "I don't know how to quite say this, but I see myself in you and it's allowing me to love myself in the mistakes." Right?

Lyz: The thing I've noticed about writing about divorce is you get so many women quietly telling you, "I can't talk about it, but I'm so glad you did." It's a conspiracy of silences, right?

Kelly:  The CPS situation was critical for that. I went back and forth on whether or not to include that, and I realized it was fear. At first I thought it was just shame, all that shitty shame stuff that we get wrapped up in. But I was able to work through that. And then I realized it was fear of getting that knock on my door again. And then realizing how many of us are living with that fear and not talking about it, not sharing it, and just cowering. I have another friend who shares similar fears and will only open her mail outside of her house because she's always waiting for the next court document from her psycho ex-husband.

Lyz: Yes. I used to get almost daily critical emails about what I said online or how I was parenting. And it made me never want to check my email and never get out of bed. This goes back to the conspiracy of silences. That's what it's intended to do. It's intended to keep women quiet about the truths of our lives, which is why when we talk about the truth of masculinity, when we talk about the truth of the way we've been treated, it's like lancing a boil, and all these women just come out and are like, "Yeah. And then let me tell you this other crazy thing."

Kelly: Another combination that I've noticed is the fact that I'm not cowering in a corner really surprises people. And that's what they want to know about, "How did you leave and you're okay?"

Lyz: I think something about your book that I love is how it also feels universal because you get so granular and specific. But you are also political without being political. How?

Kelly: I think the politics part scares me. This is my way of tricking myself into writing it. But you're right, most of my work is very political. I think even in the sense that the discussion we just had about not being silent, whether that is in the face of the Department of Defense for my first book, or in thinking about that CPS knock. It's not that I erased that fear, but the political conversation in this country has become so overwhelming and loud that so many people and so many smart people that I admire and love just turn it off.

But I think even writing landscape is political.

For me, [it’s] going really small and saying, "I'm just trying to show you something. I'm not trying to..." I have two boys. They're so different. The one is always just trying to force everything. Force brother, force me. "Why don't you just believe what I believe?" I'll always tell them the Aesop's fable about the sun and the wind. I'm always saying, "Just be the sun. Be the sun.." I think about how I have conversations with them and how quickly their eyes glaze over if I come at them with, "Now you're going to learn something." Right? But if I'm just sharing a story, that feels very different.

The reason that I opened the book with the idea that with our pack of memories flung on our backs, we venture into the circle, and that's called a memory sack. It's the same work that I feel like I try to do with my writing. We're coming to the circle. We're sharing. In this political landscape, even sharing is dangerous.

I think shining a light into places that might otherwise stay hidden is one of the most political things you can do. It's the people and the moments and the things that we feel are not worth talking about that are sometimes the most important. That's why the workday, the domestic, the small moments, that's what makes us human and what makes us all human and that is the place for bridges.