Plot Twists
On the unraveling of marriages and Maggie Smith's new memoir
“I’ve been thinking about how sometimes we write the truth before we know it.” Maggie Smith, the poet, writes that line in her new memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. A reader asked her after the publication of her book, Good Bones: “What is it like to be a single mother?”
Smith laughed in surprise. “I’m not a single mother!” she explained. But later that year, she would be. Looking back, she realizes that her husband had not appeared on any of the pages of her book.
In February of 2021, my first piece of published writing appeared in Scary Mommy. It was an essay about how hard marriage could be during the pandemic. I had titled my piece: Marriage in the Time of Covid. When it appeared on their website, they had given it the headline:
“If You Don’t Think Your Marriage Will Survive the Pandemic, You’re Not Alone.”
I cringed at the title. No, really, I was horrified! What would people think? Now I could no longer show it to my husband proudly, but I had to apologize for it. When I posted it on social media, I put a disclaimer, trying to assure people that Ryan and I were fine. It was clickbait! (Which it was.) But it was also, sadly, prescient.
Almost exactly two years after the publication of that piece, I moved out of my family home and we embarked upon the complicated process of divorce.
This might not come as a shock to you. I’ve been hinting at my frustration with the institution of marriage throughout this newsletter (here, and here, and here). My rage at imbalanced gender expectations and my desire to have the experience granted to husbands and fathers is evident in much of my writing. Something didn’t fit. Something wasn’t right. I was wrestling with the structures of my life. But it still came as a shock to me.
Divorce is the ultimate plot twist.