Divorce Essay

[Tadeo Lentz]

Threeyears ago last month, I stood in a recording studio in Baltimore, reading generally upbeat personal essays from my first-ever collection. Do you remember early March 2020? Almost no one was masking yet. Some of us were bumping elbows instead of shaking hands, then joking about how paranoid we were. It was, to put it mildly, a strange time that was about to get a lot stranger.

By March 2020, I could not imagine ever writing a personal essay again. On the precipice of my second divorce, I felt like such a failure, just not in an interesting way. And while I have never believed that I owed the world every detail about my life, I did feel that the personal essay format required a kind of authenticity I could no longer muster. So when Laura Hohnhold, an editor at Scribd, popped up in my email that spring and asked if I wanted to write something for the site, I said: No, not now, maybe one day.

Re-Reading: Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke; Eight is Enough, Tom Braden. (The death of Adam Rich sent me down the Tubi rabbit hole of Eight is Enough re-runs; the book is an interesting artifact on many levels, a time capsule of a kind of paterfamilias column that is no longer written, which is probably for the best.)

Your photos of outfits made the crazy of lockdown and beyond bearable, along with September 2020 acquisition of Izzy the traumatized accidental mom of three kittens. She is here. They all have good homes a hundred miles away.

I had never recorded an audiobook before, but, not to brag \u2014 although, really, what\u2019s so bad about bragging \u2014 I was pretty much a prodigy. My publisher had booked three days of studio time; I finished halfway through the second day. The weather was unusually mild; I walked home, a distance of 3+ miles, talking-crying on the phone with my oldest friend about the challenges facing me. My marriage, which had taken up half of my adulthood, was ending. My marriage was not my life, my life was not my marriage, but it was hard to face the unknown when everything was about to be the unknown.

On March 14, 2023, I returned to the same studio to record a 13,000-word essay about what happened to me in the summer of 2022, an essay that will be released in May by Scribd. (I know, I know \u2014 13,000 words! But the looooooooooong format is Scribd\u2019s idea.) Obviously, I\u2019m a very different person than I was three years ago. I assume we all are? At any rate, it was an opportunity to take stock.

I was relatively new to personal essays when My Life as a Villainess was published in summer 2020. While the title piece was written (but not published) in 2001, I had focused almost exclusively on fiction after leaving my newspaper job that year. When I told my family I didn\u2019t think I would ever write a memoir, my sister said: \u201CCan I get that in writing?\u201D

Yet after my kid was born in 2010, I found myself flirting with the form more and more. An invitation to write about a beloved bar led to a rumination on how I \u201Cstole\u201D my father\u2019s favorite watering hole. When my friend Ann Hood asked me for a piece about knitting, I ended up using a Christmas stocking to explain my journey to atheism.

But it was only when I pitched an essay on older motherhood to Sari Boton, then at Longreads, that my life as an essayist really began. Thanks to Sari\u2019s support and enthusiasm, I wrote about late-in-life parenting, leaving the cult of dieting, and my spotty track record as a friend. Those essays led to a book deal, with seven new pieces commissioned by my editor of long-standing, Carrie Feron at William Morrow. The final essay was called \u201CMen Explain The Wire to Me.\u201D It was an affectionate and singular story about what it\u2019s like to watch someone close to you create a cultural phenomenon. I can still see myself in Nobu in summer 2019, pitching that idea to my editor and agent, laughing at the man on social media who had patiently tried to tell me, over and over again, about this great television show that everyone needed to watch.

Inevitably \u2014 I have a terrible memory \u2014 the offer was forgotten. I continued to avoid the personal essay form, although I did write two short pandemic-related pieces where my relationship status wasn\u2019t particularly relevant; you can find them here and here.1 Then, in the summer of 2022, a good friend asked in a group chat, Is anyone familiar with Scribd? I dug out my original email correspondence with Laura H. To her credit, she had kept circling back to me for two years, even as I kept insisting I had no ideas.

But \u2014 I had fallen down a flight of steps in June 2022, injuring my rotator cuff. Two months later, my mother fell down a flight of steps, fracturing her pelvis. I was pitching Laura H. an essay about falling, in every sense of the word, within four days of my mother\u2019s accident. I\u2019m not proud of this, but I\u2019m also not not proud of this. Monetize your pain, people. Right now, I am trying to figure out if I can sell a piece about my beef with Baltimore\u2019s parking enforcement officers, who gave me a ticket for expired tags AND THE VERY CITATION THEY ISSUED SHOWED I HAD CURRENT TAGS.2

As it sometimes happens with my personal essays, I needed to live a big chunk of the \u201Cfalling\u201D idea after I proposed it. The piece I filed in November 2022 was a snapshot of my life from May into October. In fact, it\u2019s going to include actual snapshots when it\u2019s published \u2014 selfies, photos, screenshots of DMs and emails.

I am on the record as a huge fan of the criminally forgotten A Novel Called Heritage, by Margaret Dukore Smith. Its young would-be novelist is advised by her mother to take advantage of every bad thing that happens to her. \u201CUse it, Annie, use it\u201D is a motif throughout the book, published a year before Nora Ephron\u2019s Heartburn. Ephron famously said everything is copy, but I don\u2019t agree, not completely. I have tried to be respectful of the people who, through no fault of their own, ended up as \u201Ccharacters\u201D in my life \u2014 my kid, my mom, my sister, my friends, my trainer, my ex. (Kid and ex were both given a chance to read \u201CThe Summer of Fall\u201D in advance.) I think I did a pretty good job, but I\u2019m not going to lie: It\u2019s a great comfort to me that my mother and sister have no idea how to use a subscription service such as Scribd.

Like approximately kajillion people, I listen to the podcast \u201CWe Can Do Hard Things.\u201D There is an invaluable episode in which the hosts dissect the Christian/patriarchal underpinnings of the so-called Five Love Languages. They asked their kajillion listeners to share their singular love languages. One woman said: \u201CMy love language is being home alone, all day, maybe the dog can stay, but an empty-ass house.\u201D I totally identify, I used to yearn to be alone in my house for a day or two. Now, since my marriage ended, this happens to me on the regular and, go figure \u2014 I LOVE IT. My kid gives my life shape, purpose, and existential meaning, not to mention unending joy, but I do not mind the occasional night off.

On a recent solo evening, I walked to a neighborhood joint, drank a martini at the bar while reading a book, then ordered the vegetarian pizza, adding pepperoni. (It\u2019s cheaper to add pepperoni to the all-vegetable pizza than to create a pepperoni-and-vegetable pizza a la carte.) As I got up to leave, two young women at the bar said to me: \u201CI hope you don\u2019t mind if we tell you that you are GOALS with your martini and your book and your beautiful clothes.\u201D (I was wearing a pretty cool outfit, most of it used, although I had topped it off with killer Celine sunglasses, my one big splurge on a recent Paris trip.) I didn\u2019t mind at all. I laughed and said: \u201CAre you sure? Are you sure this is what you want 64 to look like?\u201D They told me they were about to leave for a seven-week trip through Southeast Asia, so their lives looked pretty good to me, too.

Later, I mused about their comments. There is a fear as one ages of being infantilized, rendered cute by one\u2019s mere existence. (Thinking about the Rapping Granny, all those adorably lascivious 80-somethings in movies and TV shows.) (Yes, \u201CRapping Granny\u201D alone ages me.) What was it about me that said GOALS? Was it my comfort at being alone? The martini? My (used) Prada pumps? My tendency to treat myself to spanking new hardcovers?

Lew Magram \u201Cvintage\u201D 90s skirt via Poshmark via Maggie Lanham\u2019s EXCELLENT Substack; Elizabeth and James turtleneck from thredUP; Nordstrom\u2019s Halogen label duster from 2016; Prada pumps from Vestiaire; Bakelite bracelet from Etsy.

3a8082e126