THIS AMERICAN EX-WIFE

The joys of being unmarried.

Journalist Lenz, author of God Land and Belabored, celebrates freedom, independence, and love in an irreverent memoir about her deeply unsatisfying marriage and eventual divorce. Drawing on interviews with women, newspaper and magazine reports, and academic studies, the author portrays marriage as “a political and cultural and romantic institution that asks too much of wives and mothers and gives too little in return.” Nevertheless, women face abundant cultural pressure to marry. Persuaded by movies, books, religious leaders, and their own parents, many women grow up convinced that finding a husband defines their self-worth: The roles of wife and mother become pinnacles of achievement. Government policies promote heterosexual, monogamous marriage by providing tax breaks and financial incentives to married couples. Even women with demanding, abusive, or unfaithful spouses are exhorted to stay married for the sake of their children. Country music, Lenz observes, pictures “our cowboys taking us away, claiming there is freedom in love.” Sociologists, cultural critics, and historians, though, have revealed widespread unhappiness consistent with her own experiences. Her husband resented her professional success. “The closer I came to achieving my dreams,” she writes, “the more my home life fell apart.” He constantly demeaned her, going so far as to take things of hers that he didn’t like and hiding them in a box. Finding the box set her on the “demolition project” that ended the marriage. “At what point is the misery worth it?” she asked herself. To women who worry that being a single parent is harder than having a husband, Lenz attests that divorce freed her to find help from a supportive community, have better sex, and achieve happiness for herself and her children. Far from being a sign of failure, divorce, she argues persuasively, can be a source of liberation.

A well-researched, acerbic critique of a sacred institution.