At the midway point of her life, a woman decides to make a solo drive from Los Angeles to New York. She has just been paid $20,000 by an ad agency for a phrase about masturbating, “but out of context it could also apply to whiskey.” The idea is to celebrate her 45th birthday 2,500 miles from her family — an affable spouse and a non-binary kid — splurge on a hotel and the theater, but the plan takes a turn, and she winds up spending three weeks of the supposed trip in a seedy motel half an hour from home, experiencing a wild and disturbing sexual awakening.

Portrait of the author Miranda July taken in 2023. Elizabeth Weinberg (RANDOM HOUSE)

Later, after returning home, she’s faced with the need to renegotiate the terms of her marriage. With this premise, Miranda July’s second novel, All Fours (Riverhead Books, 2024) became such a word-of-mouth phenomenon in the United States that The New York Times dedicated an article to “The Women Rethinking Marriage and Family Life Because of Miranda July”. If there had been a gap in the market, the novel filled it — and how.

July, who is now 51 years old but began writing the novel at 45, is far from a hermetic or inaccessible artist. Her initial idea was ambitious: find a language with which to talk about a woman’s middle age, about topics that are usually discussed behind closed doors, like perimenopause and hormonal ups and downs, libido changes and the fragility of monogamy. What to do with the marriages that survive simply out of inertia, or with the shakeups of desire that cause their very foundations to tremble.

Her raw material was personal experience. Although the book is fictional, the narrator shares certain revealing traits with July. Both are eclectic, “semi famous” authors, white, well-off, and prone to posting spontaneous dances in their underwear to Instagram. When the book’s protagonist decides to cross the Rubicon — recognize that her life is not satisfying and that it’s within her power to transform it — her choices align with those of the author. July revealed years ago that both she and her husband had girlfriends (in case anyone saw them out together, she wrote) and that they were still living together for the well-being of Hopper, their non-binary kid.

Her intention was to question the conventions of the nuclear family and to take an intimate conversation public, and the response to the book was overwhelming. Nearly as soon as it was published, an avalanche of daily messages began to crash into her inbox. Soon after, July started a Substack in which she shares and responds to readers’ letters, and where she picks apart her motivations for writing the novel, whose translation rights have been sold in at least 26 languages. Last February it was announced that an audiovisual adaptation in the form of a series is on the way.

All Fours touched a nerve. Perhaps, because it proposes a different approach to — and possible departure from — classic literary themes like the wear and tear of marital life and marriage in crisis. (Granted, its solutions require a certain level of purchasing power and many square feet: at home, the narrator and her spouse have their own bedrooms and bathrooms; at one point, she decides to spend one night a week at her studio, giving herself the gift of a dose of freedom). Maybe it’s because the novel defies the cultural belief that past a certain age, women are beyond their best-before date, that they become passive and irrelevant. Or perhaps, because the book is compulsive reading and includes sex, lots of sex, in every position and variation, and almost never with one’s spouse.

Other relatively recent titles written by women explore, through autofiction and non-fiction, the breakdown of marriage and the rupture of monogamy through more conventional formats. Such is the case of Liars (Hogarth, 2024), Sarah Manguso’s novel.

From left to right, writers Leslie Jamison, Rachel Cusk, and Sarah Manguso. PASCAL PERICH / Gianluca Battista / Beowulf Sheehan (ALPHA DECAY)

In it Manguso, who was born a mere three days before July, narrates the falling-apart of an almost comically toxic marriage from the perspective of Jane, an aggrieved wife. The plot is as old as it is familiar. A brilliant, resolute woman falls in love with a charismatic man, darkly handsome but mediocre, and projects onto him a fantasy of marital bliss: “Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood.” Her husband is John, a name as generic as the adulterer stereotype he embodies. The author has explained that the story is based on the experiences that catalyzed her own divorce during the pandemic.

In the documentary Lyubov, in which journalist Svetlana Aleksievich speaks with Russians about love, a veteran translator reflects on her long, eventful marriage: “Sometimes, only love can overcome hate.” Manguso’s narrator does not overcome hate. She takes it on, inhabits it, until it becomes the main street of her married life. Jane’s tone is dry and dispassionate, the story advances through a succession of naked facts presented without interpretation nor emphasis. It is in this accumulation of grievances that the magnitude of disillusionment becomes apparent, along with the suspicion of having been deceived by the script of romantic love. On a page chosen at random, the narrator writes: “John still talked over me, told me my feelings were stupid, blamed our fight on me, left the room in the middle of a conversation, and said it was a reasonable reaction to my being crazy.”

It’s impossible to list all of John’s disrespectful acts. One of the most serious: his near-fatal case of alcohol poisoning when she is eight months pregnant and about to embark on an important business trip that she is forced to cancel at the last minute. Why doesn’t she leave him? That is the question that sustains the story’s ambiguity.

The book’s title could be interpreted as a clue to its answer: the lie, which takes on its most basic and explicit form in its pages, operates as negation, a blind impulse to cling to the fiction of domestic harmony. Marriage, as a symbol and institution, is still too persuasive a tale. However much the narrator resents her role in it, the nuclear family offers a clear and recognizable narrative; outside that framework, there is only wilderness, that desolate, featureless territory that Rachel Cusk describes so lucidly in Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (Picador, 2013) her book about her divorce that was subject to critique so virulent in the United Kingdom that it led her to abandon non-fiction, possibly forever. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Jane’s sexual desire for her husband remains intact. One of her final reflections: “Romance is nothing but a cheap craft-store decoration made to sanitize a desire to fuck.”

Cusk published Aftermath in 2012, at a moment in which “divorce memoirs” began to consolidate into a genre on the literary market. There is nothing new about turning marital conflicts into literature — a recurrent theme since the 19th century — such books’ innovation lies in focusing on separation, its causes and effects. While 19th century novelists established the archetype of the dissatisfied wife trapped in a hypocritical marriage, in our century, another canon has emerged: Dorothea Brooke, Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina now leave their husbands — or are left by them — and take their disillusionment public.

The trickle began decades ago with books like Heartburn, the openly autobiographical novel in which Nora Ephron, with her characteristic humor, dissects her ex-husband’s infidelities. Published in 1983, its Spanish and Catalan translations were recently released. In 2007, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love brought the trend mainstream, selling tens of millions of copies and birthing a film adaptation starring Julia Roberts.

Then there are the authors who, like Cusk, analyze their experience using personal chronicle or essay. In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria/One Signal, 2023), poet Maggie Smith explains her husband’s infidelity and subsequent abandonment soon after one of her poems went viral.

Last year, Leslie Jamison published Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story (Little, Brown and Company; 2024) in which she tells of the rise and collapse of her brief marriage, as well as the life that followed: that of a single mother with an 11-month-old baby. Like the previous examples, Jamison’s perspective on married and family life is informed by her profession, the trait-in-common of this literary canon. Balancing ambition and creative process with domestic responsibilities is a major source of friction in these books, especially in narratives such as this one, in which both spouses have artistic aspirations and one is more successful than the other.

Besides when she hides some aspects of her family life, Jamison does not turn to fiction. She meets C in the shared kitchen of the place of their mutual workplace. He is a writer as tattooed as he is tormented, she is an ambitious journalist who sees in him a promise of redemption. Their process of falling in love was immediate and fulminant, “like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth,” and escalated rapidly. By the time he tattooed her face on his bicep, after being in a relationship for a year, they were already wed. After getting hitched in Las Vegas and the initial euphoria, living together is inevitably dysfunctional. Disillusionment becomes continuous, hopeless and daily.

Less than a year after giving birth, Jamison leaves C and moves with their daughter to a small one-bedroom apartment. Throughout the book, the author returns to this decision again and again. “Did honoring my vows mean figuring out how to make a home with C’s anger? What did I owe his pain? What did I owe my daughter?” Among the questions is that which precedes all divorce: “How do you know when a marriage is no longer possible to save?”

Each of these books, in its own way, tries to approach that question. As a rule, the answer is partial and subjective. In her film Anatomy of a Fall, winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2023, French director Justine Triet sheds light on this essential ambiguity inherent to all relationship stories: that all narrators are reliable, up to a certain point. The movie translates this uncertainty to a court case, in which it must be determined if a husband’s fatal fall was an accident, suicide or murder committed by his spouse. Shortly before, the couple had fought acrimoniously, blaming each other for their emotional blockage and his creative frustration. The lack of external witnesses prevents any clearing-up of what happened. Ultimately, it is their blind child who has to place a bet — blindly — on one of these versions.

Within the literature of divorce there are books that openly embrace this subjectivity, and even aestheticize loss. In The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Vintage, 2002), the collection of poems with which Anne Carson won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the narrator evokes her persistent desire for a chronically unfaithful spouse. “Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty. / As I would again if he came near. / Beauty convinces. / You know beauty makes sex possible. / Beauty makes sex sex.” Carson’s book has become canon, a pillar of this particular sub-genre.

In a similar key, Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012) by Sharon Olds presents 50 poems that acknowledge the mourning left by a separation from her spouse, a doctor who left her for a colleague after decades of matrimony. From the initial revelation to the first gestures of rupture, moments in which “all is courtesy and horror”, Olds tries to understand the reasons behind his flight. “I think he had come, in private, to / feel he was dying, with me, and if / he had what it took to rip his way out, with his / teeth, then he could be born.”

In Meadowlands, Louise Glück weaves together scenes inspired by her own marriage-in-crisis with those of the falling-out of a mythic couple: Odysseus and Penelope. In contrast to the previous examples, the work incorporates the point of view of their son, silent witness to the emotional ups and downs of his parents. The gaze of Telemachus, now an adult, exudes an ironic detachment that serves as a brutal summary of married life: “When I was a child looking / at my parents’ lives, you know / what I thought? I thought / heartbreaking. Now I think / heartbreaking, but also / insane. Also / very funny.”

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