The Liberating Frankness of the Divorce Memoir

Allow me to impart some important life advice: Do not divorce, or allow yourself to be divorced by, a memoirist. Regardless of what a marital saint you were, you’re not going to come off well in the retelling—if a public reckoning with an ex’s crimes weren’t somewhere on the agenda, would the divorce memoir exist as a genre in the first place? Nevertheless, dissecting a marriage at book length is a high-risk wager for an author: You will lay yourself bare for our scrutiny, and we will take your side. But will we?