What women want
On the audacity of public desire
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I’ve spent the last few weeks reading Leslie Jamison’s new memoir, Splinters, which explores her experience of early motherhood and divorce. I am also finishing Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, which is epic (and now a NY Times bestseller!!). For a bigger thing I’m writing, I’ve spent the past few months reading and talking with people about marriage and sex. Let’s just say, if it’s not obvious, I’m thinking a lot about women and desire lately.
I don’t love the term “divorce memoir” any more than I love the term “motherhood memoir.” Reducing a book (and an author’s writing) to either of these topical categories flattens out genre, oversimplify narratives and arguments that are full of nuance, and feminizes/trivializes authors who are women in frustrating ways. But reading both of these books, and observing the conversation happening now around them, has illuminated a few things for me. Most significantly: that women writing about what they want remains very unsettling to people across the political spectrum.
Both of these books are about divorce, but they’re also about desire—about making it/remembering it as aesthetic, existential, political, and public. Where once women in literature were relegated to the realms of sentimental romance, domesticity, and what Laura Mulvey, mother of the male gaze, called to-be-looked-at-ness, women who write are now becoming their own protagonists, for an audience of women. People seem worried.