In 2023, when COVID was still hovering in the corner of our eyes, Belle Burden published a Modern Love essay in the New York Times about the abrupt ending of her marriage over lockdown. She hadn’t seen it coming. She hadn’t even a clue. And she was provided with no answers. “On March 22, at 6am, my husband told me he wanted a divorce,” she wrote. “He packed a bag, got in his Jeep and boarded a ferry. We had been married for nearly 21 years.”
“I had no idea he was unhappy,” Burden continued, in the clear, plain tones of someone who can still taste an event. “He wasn’t affectionate or adoring, but I felt a current of abiding love. He never flirted with other women in front of me. We didn’t bicker. He seemed content and invested in our life. He designed an addition to our garage and planted blueberry bushes in the year before he left.” As you’ve probably already guessed, he was having an affair. “He bought a sleek new Manhattan apartment, hired a well-known divorce lawyer, and treated me with a consistent lack of empathy or sentiment.”
In January 2026, Burden will release a memoir, Strangers, off the back of this essay, giving an even more detailed and emotionally evocative account. I received an advance copy of the book and gobbled it up in about three sittings. I won’t tell you any more about it until it comes out, but something struck me while I was deep in its pages: Why do I find myself so completely enraptured by the intricate details of a New England mother’s complicated but relatively average divorce? And why is the messy divorce novel–and it is messy, even just with regards to the legal admin presumably involved in such a project–so engaging, so addictive, and so very right now?
The past few years have seen a number of divorce novels of this ilk. Sarah Manguso’s Liars, released last year, tells the tale of a strange, hateful marriage (think: affluent heterosexual artists at each other’s throats until the very end). Liars is fictional, sure, but written in the style of memoir, with a raw personal tone that feels like the furious thoughts that might churn around one’s brain at night. Splinters by Leslie Jamison, also from last year, is as much about motherhood as it is about trying to rebuild a life post-divorce. “We had a thousand things, like everyone,” writes Jamison, of her marriage. “But who will find them beautiful now?”
Though I am a die-hard romantic, I can’t be the only person who finds divorce novels—the ones full of bile, betrayal, all of those juicy things—much more captivating than books about love in its infancy. The above are stories of people who chose to create a life together, only to then actively opt out. People fall out of love constantly, they change their minds, they become strangers overnight—such a thing is so normal it’s mundane almost—and that is something I’ve always found fascinating, chilling even. “The whole concept of a break-up is terrifying to me,” I remember admitting to a therapist years ago (go figure). “How can you be everything one moment, and then nothing the next?”
Indeed, I wonder whether the collective interest in the divorce novel is an existential one. In many ways, such books attempt to pick apart that most human of things: building something, only for it to inevitably collapse, which will happen to all of us eventually (whether through divorce or death—sorry!). Though I don’t like to think of my own marriage ending, I think in trying to understand how other people’s did, how such a structure can topple quietly or loudly, I am also trying to understand life and its mysterious patterns. “Marriage is a mode of manifestation,” Rachel Cusk wrote in Aftermath, her own 2013 divorce novel. “It absorbs disorder and manifests it as order. It receives chaos, diversity, confusion, and it turns them into form.”
Why there appears to be an abundance of divorce novels and memoirs in the 2020s specifically is a more complex matter entirely (others include: Awake by Jen Hatmaker, All Fours by Miranda July, No Fault by Haley Mlotek, Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey). The internet-addled among us might point to a wave of straight women leaning into heteropessimism, and choosing to air their dirty laundry rather than smooth over the edges (as prior generations might have done). I think this is probably true. I also think we’re in an era when some are grappling with the concept of marriage—an old-fashioned construct, the totem of monogamy; at least in vibe if not in practice—and what that even means in the 2020s.
Either way, that most private of things, divorce, is now being picked up and held to the light. And I, for one, can’t stop looking at it.
Below, seven more messy divorce novels and memoirs to read (or revisit) now:
Heartburn by Nora Ephron (1983)
This novel is over four decades old, yet it remains an absolute font of wisdom (not to mention wit) for any and all women scorned. In Heartburn, Ephron gives a thinly veiled account of the end of her own second marriage that’s alternately hilarious and heartbreaking. But don t worry; her real life had a happy ending.
The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg (2020)
Wizenberg’s emerging queerness and ensuing divorce from her husband are the central themes of this riveting memoir. Reading about how she and her family made space for her identity is a welcome reminder that the end of a marriage can sometimes usher in a more honest and well-rounded life.
With Teeth by Kristen Arnett (2021)
In With Teeth, as Sammie and her wife Monika struggle to raise their uniquely mystifying son, Samson, Sammie reaches her limit. There’s nothing remotely idealized about Sammie and Monika’s relationship or eventual split, but Arnett’s portrait of their family dynamic is captivating.
Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo (2021)
This novel gives its female protagonist, Anna, a rich storyline beyond the bounds of her recent separation from her husband: Anna, a young biracial woman living in England, returns to her Nigerian hometown to seek out the truth about her father’s death, richly complicating the divorce narrative.
You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (2023)
“We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves–all of our selves–wherever we go,” poet Smith writes in this lyrical and innovatively crafted memoir about committing to herself first and foremost in the aftermath of her divorce from the father of her children.
Clam Down by Anelise Chen (2025)
The title of this book, as well as its central conceit, is taken from a typo in a text that the narrator’s mother sends to her. Shortly after her divorce, Chen’s narrator is transformed into a clam in a clever and fantastical update to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee (2025)
A Chinese-American woman names her newly discovered tumor after her husband’s mistress in this quirky, thoughtful, and genuinely funny exploration of what it means to be left behind by your partner and discover a whole new life in the wake of your relationship’s destruction.
