Goulded cages

Towards a new feminist personal essay

Anyone who remembers—and how could one not—that the writer Emily Gould did a crowd-funding campaign to divorce her terrible husband (also a writer; it’s always thus), only to reconcile with this husband, probably had some questions. Gould went and answered those and then some in a new essay on The Cut, which rather complicates things.

There is one narrative about how marriages fall apart, and it is a genre into which her Go Fund Me plea, at least as I remember it, fit neatly:

In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, as in Aftermath, I found an airtight case for divorce. The husband was the villain and the wife the wronged party, and the inevitable result was splitting up. I felt an echo of this later on when I read Lyz Lenz’s polemic This American Ex-Wife, out this month, marketed as “a deeply validating manifesto on the gender politics of marriage (bad) and divorce (actually pretty good!).” 

Men have it easy, women get pushed around, women do all the work and all the chores and get none of the credit and pay gaps and and and.

Gould reads all of this, steeps herself in the men-are-bastards literature of the past years/decades, and concludes, “This was not quite the way I felt.”

I cannot emphasize enough, having read many such items for researching-straight-women purposes, what a tremendous break this is from business as usual. Because if you’re a 40ish straight or straightish woman, you’re meant to feel one thing.

Gould tries to funnel her angst-and-then-some into the expected feminist narrative, but is stymied by her realizations that she’s done a lot of bad things, and that her husband, too, is a person. She looks at the facts on the ground and isn’t able to blame the patriarchy for her own messy blend of mental illness and bad choices.

Can I relate? I can and I can’t. On the specifics, no. I am too much about staying in and watching reruns to implode my life via alcohol or affairs, and my own buying of dumb shit, while doubtless a personality flaw I possess, is not bankrupting my family, either because I am fortunate not to get manic or because I am too particular about which dumb shit to buy enough of it to accomplish this. (I have been known to visit leggings on Poshmark and then decide against.)

But I can relate to reading all these righteous books and essays about women done wrong by patriarchy (she doesn’t mention Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful but that’s the epitome) and thinking that when I’m feeling burnt out, dreading another night on which dinner needs to be cooked (Gould: “it also turns out that the kids won’t eat dinner no matter who cooks it” TRUTH), surely this is what I am experiencing, too. Not because I am (I am, objectively, not experiencing these things) but because that is what it is to be a married woman with a career and little kids who is tired.

I have read and internalized these patterns, as Gould had, as everyone who reads mainstream books and articles aimed at our demographic is bound to do. When I try to create meaning or make sense of things or what have you, this is all I know. I find myself having to remind myself that I am just worn out, that this is life with little kids and demanding careers and no local family to help. Gould and I might be two very different people, but we live in the same bowl of righteous, ban-men soup.

What Gould accomplishes with her essay—to be turned into/part of a book—is to say that individual cases are individual. That we are not all of us mere manifestations of systemic issues, our own little stories the intro, then step back and give statistics, in the non-fiction magazine format, wherein our own stories are always that of women generally, but extra so for marginalized women, requisite disclaimer. “There was not a moment during my divorce that I did not think about what it would be like to go through a separation while being subject to more economic precarity.” Thank you, Leslie Jamison, for this reminder that you are sensitive and attuned, or, perhaps, that the privilege acknowledgement lives on.

Emily Gould is Emily Gould. She is not The Woman in The Marriage, to The Man. She is not you or me. She is herself.

Is this an endorsement of Gould as a wife or mother? I refuse to dignify this by addressing it, because if nothing else she herself addresses this. I for one am not interested in reading personal essays for whether they are successful at arguing that the author is a good person. Indeed, I can think of another memoirish book, my review of which you will be seeing but not just yet, whose author identifies as a person who puts others first, as a supreme self-sacrificer, a people-pleaser. But all she does time and again is explore, with anyone she can get (or pay) to listen, the inner workings of her own navel. That I find off-putting, as a reader.

Gould’s thesis is not, Emily Gould is a wonderful role model who deserves congratulation. What she successfully conveys is that she is human, flawed, and an engaging writer. This is itself a kind of feminism, not rah-rah-go-mistreat-your-family feminism, not see-I-was-wronged feminism, just “the radical notion that women are people.”