ON THE DIVORCE-SPECTER

my thoughts on the institution of divorce, my novel Blood Trip, marriage, children

ON THE DIVORCE-SPECTER

Don’t get it twisted. Sometimes divorce is the best pathway forward. For the sake of the kids, get out and away from each other. Staying together “for the kids” might be consigning them to a domestic hell. Divorce is complicated and can serve as an escape hatch for women otherwise trapped by emotional mutants.

I wrote a novel about divorced people who were not made of the right stuff. Divorce is a fascinating topic of literary and cinematic inquiry because it is everything about love and marriage that is tentatively held together, it’s society crumbling in miniature. It’s a puzzling force of nature that people unleash upon the one person they swore to protect and cherish above all others, done to defend their own emotional integrity and security. Divorce is raw and ripe for mythologizing and full of Rashomon-like twists and turns. Louis CK said that marriages are temporary but divorce just grows stronger and permanent like an oak tree.

On some level there’s a part of me that wishes every happily married person could experience, perhaps by VR goggles and insulin-shock therapy injections, the adrenaline and plummeting despair of getting divorced: not as the initiator of the divorce but as the one it is imposed upon. I don’t know why I feel this. I don’t want people to suffer but I think it would teach people something. Well, there is a part of me (those damned parts of me, there are a million of them) that wants people to suffer.

I wrote in a poem once that “The happily married are deaf.” I meant that there are love songs on the radio which contain hidden edges that are only felt by people who’ve had that crashing experience of having their hearts yanked out through their throats. “It’s the same old song / with a different meaning since you’ve been gone.” The Cars: “since you’re gone / moonlight ain’t so great.” Everybody gets a fragment of this in their lives, if they’re living a really human existence that isn’t some Walt Disney bullshit. But those who have felt the massive tectonic reversal under their feet of a marriage failing, dying, the anger, jealousy, pulverizing sadness, fear, and come out of it a decade later with some affection for their fellow human, are my brothers and sisters in venom.

But Jesse, you say, this doesn’t make you special. Everybody goes through this in some way. I had a bad break up in my 20s. I got cheated on. Ok, you’re right. It’s not unique to me. I can just tell you that it’s something unique to break it to a six year old child that their parents are splitting up and listening to the eerily teenaged sounds of the child crying and screaming, while you look at your spouse and think: You did this. You had to be like your friends, you had to follow in their oh so sophisticated footsteps and cause this divorce to happen. And unseen by you at that time are all of your contributions, all the things you did to force it to be the only way out for them. The clinging you did to your mental health diagnosis that you loved like another woman and emotionally cheated on your wife with. The tiredness and unwillingness to participate in the spoken gratitude routines your wife wanted you to do at your kid’s bedside after you got home from work. Your inwardness, your driving around aimlessly listening to post-rock and crying and smoking. Your resentment of your in laws about which you fear writing about here, you turn them into ghosts in the story. “The man of the house doesn’t live here,” you said to the cable TV salesman who came to your door to sell you five hundred channels when he asked if you were the man of the house on some 1970s door-to-door shit. You mowed the lawn and shoveled the sidewalk. You went to work and listened to sniggering co-workers insinuate that to be married meant you were some kind of faggot. You stayed in bed well into morning avoiding your father-in-law who came over to put your kid on the bus, then drive to the school to help her get off the bus until the school district told him to stop it. There I said it. You never touched your wife with any desire toward the end. Prickly black vines grew up around everything choking out all life and passage like those vines that grew up around Cinderella’s castle in the cartoon movie you watched with your kid who we have to say was blameless and a total victim of her parents’ unhappiness. They say to write the thing that makes you scared. That’s where you know the valuable topic of writing is. You have to go deep into the dark ancient temple to retrieve the golden idol and you use your loved ones as human shields against the poison darts. That’s what you do as a writer.

I dreaded showing my divorced father crime novel to my family. I was terrified that they would read it, that my daughter would read it and think I really felt this way about my ex wife and her new husband. In the book the divorced dad plots to have the new husband, his replacement, murdered. I wanted to write a crime novel with a truly antisocial atrocity that would shock people. It was a fictional extrapolation (interpolation?) of my own still outwardly civilized but inwardly chaotic negativity and emotional landscape. I was so worried how people would take this personal triumph: my first novel. I wracked my brain to get my story straight like a criminal himself: what it meant, how distant it was from my true feelings, how it was intended to be a kind of exorcism of my own thoughts and feelings.

I could write twenty more novels using jet-black obsidian treasures pulled from the deep, dark well of my divorce. I wrote in the divorce’s aftermath voluminously, frenziedly, full of fear and delusional paranoia. I have stacks of notebooks of that writing. I will fear even more if that writing comes to light than I did fear my murder mystery being read, not because there are any worse crimes or focused hatred in those notes. I don’t know why I fear that writing. I have a relatively good relationship with my ex-wife and her husband in spite of the novel Blood Trip, I’d like to think. I think that he gets he was not meant to be a real-world target. He reads crime novels, thrillers, mysteries, he inhales them, and watches Hercule Poirot series on TV. They get that there is a fictional texture to everything.

I worry more about my ex-wife and my daughter reading what I’ve written, this other material. The rights and responsibilities of a writer to their family members is a touchy sensitive topic. Some writers give the advice that “if people were really concerned about how they show up in someone else’s fiction, they should have behaved better.” I think that’s kind of some stupid garbage. I see an intro to fiction creative writing teacher telling her students that before going home to her stupid house with her stupid garden and stupid stack of applications for arts grants or residencies. I think it’s too facile and heartless and amateur-masquerading-as-pro to give that kind of advice.

I don’t know how to end this substack post. I got divorced and it was painful and confusing and I spent a lot of time trying to tell jokes to my ex wife to get her to take me back. In the moments when we met to hand off my daughter for the weekend I showed I could laugh about it with the secret motive of making her laugh and putting the brakes on her decision and getting her to see her error. I did my share of male, husbandly manipulation that thankfully did not work. I have a strong dose of something that might not quite be narcissism in my makeup, but is something unhealthy. If you even vaguely threaten suicide to your spouse if they leave you — even in the most subtly twisted pretzel logic of interpretations — that is emotional abuse. I could be accused of being a member of that criminal gang. I hope I have learned from my mistakes and grown as a person capable of sensitivity and care and respect. I hope that in writing the novel about the divorce and the murder plot I have shown others and myself that it’s possible to transcend the twisted personality of the wounded masculine coward sexually and romantically cut off from his spouse, the woman he loved but it was a necrotic, propped-up type of love at the end, a dead love he still thought was alive.

I don’t want to write about my daughter and her passive role in all this. That is too hard. I just remember (another poem I wrote) the way she tried to join us back together again when I dropped her off at her mother’s house after her weekend with me. She wanted us to hug as a trio again, then would run off to leave us hugging, tricked by her childish magical thinking. That soon ended. Kids are mechanics, engineers of their parents’ emotions working from earnest, heartbreaking blueprints. And the reconstruction of the bridge — her own innocent, scared animal, stuffed animal version of her father’s manipulation — did not work.