31 Comments
Feb 15Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

V much agree with this. I really admired the guts to write an essay in which she was not a wronged party and basically the villain of her own life.

One thing I wanted to mention that I really liked in Gould's essay is that she acknowledges she's the one who, in some grand marriage court, is in the wrong here, but also fixing the marriage itself can't really come down to just who is in the wrong. Her list of things she has to forgive and be forgiven for is comically unbalanced but I think that's the point (or it was to me)… the marriage itself can't survive if it's trapped in a cycle of acting out and then eating shit. There has to be grace and give and take. (Otherwise, there's divorce.)

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100%. Which is why the MRA-tinged 'how can she equate what she did with what he did' misses the point!

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Feb 15Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

yeah, it's obviously fine and normal to view cheating for instance as a "you do this, it's over" bright red line… but if you _do not_ view it that way, then the way you heal and move on as a couple isn't going to be "one person acknowledges they're the worst forever and ever."

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I was just now in the DMs explaining to someone that I think the public, my-husband-is-terrible divorce-themed Go Fund Me was more of a red line than the (per her account, one-off) cheating.

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I don't think it really does considering that the "solution" is that her husband (who I understand works a 9 to 5? Unlike her?) ends up sharing more of the housework. What sense does that make? It really seems like, even from her telling, the husband has done absolutely nothing wrong. Maybe the husband needs to do more to validate her feelings but it would probably be better if she just accepted that she was wrong and worked on herself.

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Feb 15Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Since Gould's piece opens by sticking pretty close to the template for the "I divorced my husband, for feminism" essay, I was genuinely shocked when she acknowledged, about 1/3 of the way in, that her husband had an interior life, just like hers, and was suffering just like she was. That's not a sensibility that gets featured much in this genre at the moment.

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Feb 15Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Wow. She went all in on destroying her life. I really appreciate this, that she wrote an essay in which her husband is not the Bad Guy. How refreshing! It's true, this is what it's like to be a tired mom. It's super easy to resent everything.

I tell you what, now that I am an empty-nester, everything is so much easier. Neither of us has changed; the workload just got less. Which I guess proves that life with children, in our current system, has become almost impossible. That fits with my theory that we have accidentally made our society so complex and difficult to live in that hardly anybody can do it and feel like a reasonably happy successful human.

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"Which I guess proves that life with children, in our current system, has become almost impossible."

From what I can tell, the acceptable minimum standard for a middle-class childhood in the West has gone up astronomically in the last 50 or so years. Not so long ago, if you fed your kids, put a roof over their heads, and didn't beat them so badly that they never got to be big kids, you were doing a pretty good job.

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Feb 16Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Perhaps in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-lamotrigine-go-I way, I ended up finding Gould’s essay far more sympathetic than expected. Ah, the perils of maladaptive coping mechanisms and poor impulse control!

It also hit home for another reason: I have a close family member who exploded her marriage in a similar way recently (though without the cheating or the alcohol, but with the untreated bipolar and husband blaming aspects, and thankfully with no children), and I wish she could have had even a little of Gould’s current self-awareness. Even if my family member’s marriage wasn’t salvageable, at least she’d have been open to mediation instead of hell-bent on revenge for largely imagined wrongs.

So hats off to Gould for her honesty and willingness to take responsibility for the pain she caused, even though she was out of her mind at the time. I honestly hope it works out for them now.

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Feb 15Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

I seem to follow a number of 40ish Substackers and Substack-adjacent women who are suddenly getting divorced (Virginia Sole-Smith, Amy Palanjian, Joanna Goddard, Lyz Lenz), so it was interesting to see Gould's essay go so differently. I'm 20 years older than everyone, apparently, so I've had some exasperated Grandma thoughts about this trend, but I try to keep my mouth shut about it.

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Feb 16Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

With you on the 20 years etc. I will never forget the review of A Bitch In the House that basically said: the kids will grow up and you will get over it.

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Please share your exasperated Grandma thoughts! I've also noticed this trend but figured it was just millennials reaching middle age.

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The extremely short version:

1) Weren't you paying attention in women's studies? Susan B. Anthony wrote about this, and subsequently every famous feminist author wrote about it, so why are you so surprised? (And why are you reinventing the wheel?)

2) You are the ones who keep insisting that everything under the sun is a systemic problem. But you were all going to solve this particular systemic problem by marrying "one of the good ones"? You were going to overcome patriarchy by sheer force of will? That's not how systemic solutions work, Debbie.

3) In a more sympathetic vein, you need to rise up and collectively reject the obsessive, intensive parenting that dominates the Totebag class of women. It's insane and unsustainable. Burn down the American Academy of Pediatrics. Those diktats make St. Paul's epistles look laid-back and louche.

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The obsessive parenting is wild when you consider that most research suggests that none of it really matters. Like, make sure your kid doesn't do anything too stupid and try to make sure they don't hang around a bad crowd, everything else probably doesn't matter.

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The "totebag class".

I so am lifting this.

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I’ll need to gather my thoughts about points #1 and #2, but I’m SO with you on #3

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Yes, this may mark an improvement over the current state of marriage commentary ("emotional labor", et al), but if so, that is a statement of how bad things were.

Consider this from the perspective of a young man considering manage. Your wife can disregard her own mental illness, develop a round-the-clock drinking habit, spend money you don't have, cheat on you, and publicly raise money to for an anticipated custody battle with you. If you stay with her through all that (as you promised you would), she may come to a place where she no longer puts 100% of the blame for marital problems on you. The most severe consequence for her behavior may be that she only would have partial custody of your children in the event of a divorce. Your choices are to either remain in this marriage, or have your children spend half their time in the exclusive care of this mentally ill person.

The applause for this is a bonanza for the Andrew Tates of the world.

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"Consider this from the perspective of a young man considering [marriage]." If this man has lived on the planet for more than a day, he will realize that women like Gould - at least Gould as she describes herself - are few and far between. As are men like that. Most people are not like that. And most who are like that do not up and surprise their spouses by becoming like that after marriage.

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I agree that her behavior is an outlier.

Stipulating that, then how can this piece serve as a rejoinder to the "Yay divorce!" stuff? Yes, it doesn't apply to someone who hit this kind of undeniable rock bottom, but what about the majority of women?

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Feb 17Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

Forgive me, but I am struggling to picture "the young man considering marriage" who is dispassionately weighing literary personal essays about mental illness from the Cut against the dispatches of Andrew Tate.

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I think that the stories we put out into public and celebrate matter (otherwise why bother?) If the story was about someone getting away with murder, or having joined in the 1/6 protest, or having been a physically abusive husband, I doubt we'd be wagging our fingers at those who were more repulsed by the behavior described than by the technical content of the writing.

I think we want husbands to behave in the manner similar to Gould's husband's. But if the story we put out to the world is that if you do, what you'll get at the end is a grudging admission that maybe you aren't the worst person in the world and the source of all problems, I think people will be less inclined to do it.

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I find myself in complete agreement with you. And if she's such an outlier, why are we discussing her at all?

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Why are we discussing her if she is different from most women/most people? I mean I am because it's an interesting essay and interesting in what it says about where the feminist personal essay is at the moment.

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That's fair!

Yes- it is super interesting, for sure. I just found myself having a visceral dislike of the author. It's not the world's most sophisticated or nuanced take, but there it is.

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Feb 16Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

She's like a Westworld character, determined to escape the confines of a narrative loop.

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Superb writing

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Nice reading of the essay. I had similar thoughts, especially about the narrative arc of the piece and the way she articulated the dominant feminist divorce narrative and then upended it with her own story. The essay is actually a subtle piece of literary criticism.

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Feb 16Liked by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

I didn’t know that her husband was the one writing about their son, Rafi. I’ve been meaning to read his dispatches in the New Yorker, and now when I do I’ll have an eye towards the hothouse Rafi is being raised in as a New York City Child Of Intellectuals.

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I applaud Gould for summoning the personal honesty to realize that she had been very selfish in many respects, and to recognize the value in her husband, his sacrifices, and the potential to rebuild. As a 63-year-old writer, married for 36 years, mother of four, grandmother of 11, who has published 5 books and has been writer for more than 40 years (it's hard for me to confess these numbers, but given the topic I think it's relevant), I find it very sad that feminism's excesses over the past generations have led so many women to feel that somehow, life needs to be "fair." Life isn't fair. Motherhood is hard, but how tiresome it is to hear women complaining about its enervating asepcts all the time, mostly women who are living with more choices, more material wealth, than any women in history. Nothing in life that is truly, monumentally consequential will ever be anything but hard work, requiring self-sacrifice, patience, and--this is key--a long-term view. This includes marriage and raising kids.

I have been extremely fortunate that my husband, who has run a small but successful business, has been totally supportive of my work, my biggest cheerleader, especially when I've had bouts of professional jealousy (of other writers) and resentful at the low pay of my field. We have also been blessed to have had a foundation of religious Jewish values, living in communities that supported our values and choices of "family first." This has helped me not lose sight of the short- and long-term value of the mundane tasks involved in managing a family, and working through the ebbs and flows of a marriage.

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I think her essay was really about mental illness and how she got so out of control. That’s hard to say out loud.

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Ok, fine. I've listened to your podcast, I read this, you (and Kat) have convinced me, I was wrong in my initial reading of the Gould piece. I am now team divorce-not-divorce lady. TO be clear, I didn't want to throw her on a fire originally, but I did feel like there still wasn't quite enough of a sense of how many of the grievances towards her marriage seemed to be manufactured or embellished by her mental state or other personal issues, I wondered if they should even keep trying with the level of resentment that she had built, and I thought she still seemed to be minimizing the emotional experience of her for-now husband. And I still feel so much sympathy for what has gone through.

But now I know more about Gould herself as a character (I hadn't heard of either of them prior to this essay), her arc, and just how jarring this essay is in the context of the 30/40-something female divorce chronicle genre. Reading a bit more carefully and with said context, I can appreciate more the degree to which she was exposing herself to be publically flayed and things like how she describes avoiding going into the bedroom she chose for herself after returning from in-patient care indicate more strongly how much she views her separation as painful, something that I previously didn't really get.

Does she show "sufficient" contrition in this confessional essay? That's a question for a priest or a bookie making odds on the longevity of her marriage. Ultimately, it is her loved ones, not us readers, that are owed apologies, and I don't begrudge even someone who has (perhaps unintentionally) founded their career on autobiography keeping those moments private.

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