Our Divorced Divas are Dying

I’ve been thinking a lot about the roles that we play and how we learned those roles. It’s a question Michaela asked me during my interview at Centre Pompadour. And when I was back up in my room in the attic, I opened an earlier draft of my manuscript and found that I’d already told that story.

Here’s the beginning of it:

I put this chapter in the most recent chapter of my book. Then I started taking notes, outlining what those roles were:

And found that I’d already written chapters about these topics, these roles and where I learned them. But they had been cut from the book.

So, I organized them. And they created a new arc to the story. One that I cut from the story because once, a mentor said that divorce stories are boring, “What’s interesting is what comes before or after.”

At the residency, that perspective was challenged.

“Was it from a man?”

Yes, it was.

Right away, I knew why she was asking — men and women have different views of what they bring into a marriage and through a divorce.

It’s why I’m writing this damn book. Not because “my husband did something so bad and awful to me,” but because I grew up in this world where I was a sponge and pulled in expectations for what it meant to be a wife and a woman in the time that I grew up. We all do.

So I put those chapters back in the book:

You’ve already read one of them:

I read a headline about Nicole Kidman’s divorce from Keith Urban, saying that she’s giving a “masterclass” in divorce.

For fucks sake, if there’s one time that a woman doesn’t need to perform to anyone’s expectations, it’s when she’s going through a fucking divorce.

Diane Keaton, age 79, passed away this weekend. Diane played Annie MacDuggan Paradis in my favorite movie about divorce, First Wives Club (1996). The semi-spacecase divorcée who turns out to be the ringleader of the pack. Leading her college best friends—all divorcées—to get revenge on their ex.

This is the first time divorce came to Hollywood in such a powerful way, where women are owning the narrative of divorce. It’s inspiring to me, as someone who would get divorced twenty years after watching this movie on VHS at a slumber party when I was 10.

I’m preparing for the next Ladies’ Night storytelling show that I’m producing here in Lausanne. The show puts divorce stories on stage.

Tonight, the call for stories closes. I’ve been reading the submissions as they come in, delighted at how women are interpreting the hot mess theme. Thinking about Diane Keaton, Nicole Kidman, and other divorced divas who wrote a version of what it means to be a divorced woman, and how I get to write another one through my work with Dispatched Divorcée.

That’s something.

Now, time to go work on my own hot mess story1 :)