“My marriage ended on a Monday.”
Lyz Lenz opens This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life (out Feb. 20, 2024) this simply. And she pulls no punches in laying out her nonfiction narrative that interrogates the traditions and institutions behind marriage. We follow the arc of Lenz’s divorce — her desperation folds wildly into liberation and then into peace — and she cites exhaustive research about the history of marriage and its realities over time.
I expected to love this book. I subscribe to Lenz’s newsletter (Men Yell At Me on Substack) and read her other two books. What I did not expect was for a book about divorce to cause me deep introspection and prompt me into awkward conversations with people who have never married. I didn’t expect to question my own motivations to marry (my poor spouse is probably worried about me) or how my straight friends are doing in their marriages.
Lenz is careful to note that research and statistics surrounding marriage and divorce are almost exclusive to cishet marriages and primarily from white backgrounds. She is careful to note how the realities behind the statistics have steeper imbalances for poor women and women of color. So when Lenz talks about the patriarchal systems at play she’s talking about the well-documented ways people have been socialized over a couple thousand years in the West — and how that plays out in real life.
Early in the book Lenz reveals that 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women, then dives headfirst into research that explains this.
“Often these women are dismissed as a lone mad woman, unable to cope. They are problems for a therapist and a self-help book to solve. Certainly not a political crisis,” she writes. “But I don’t think that’s true.”
Lenz discloses conversations she’s had with unhappy wives and happy divorcees: “These weren’t just stories of women falling out of love, but of a political and cultural and romantic institution that asks too much of wives and mothers and gives too little in return.”
Identity is a constant negotiation and discovery, something we concoct from the raw material of our lives.
Lyz Lenz
At the start of the book, Lenz tells her personal story like she’s revealing a secret, but she grounds her narrative with data. As the book moves forward, the narrative braid weaves more completely. In the beginning, she gives us facts and sadness. In the middle she gives us equal parts fact and wildness. In the end she gives us a sweet denouement, showing readers her own liberation and what that looks like for other divorced women.
Marketed in the “Biography & Memoir” category, there are both intimate details and studies of sociology — and they come together to show a candid image of Western marriage, warts and all. But it’s also a beautiful piece of writing. It’s a coming-of-age memoir of liberation.
“Identity is a constant negotiation and discovery, something we concoct from the raw material of our lives,” she tells us in what feels like a thesis. This American Ex-Wife is a triumph of creative nonfiction, situating itself in the relatively unique position of being a seriously researched treatise on a cultural phenomenon and also being a piece of literature. This book is Lenz leveling up.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s February 2024 issue.
