Divorce writing may be the toughest thing a memoirist can do other than covering a war,” writes Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir. Yet the divorce memoir — and its shy cousin, the autofictional divorce novel — has experienced a resurgence over the past couple of years with works that range from poetic to empowering to startlingly bitter about the whole institution of marriage. Here, a taxonomy of upcoming and recently published divorce books, mostly from the perspective of the erstwhile wife in a heterosexual union. (Which literary man will dare write the great ex-husband memoir?)
Give Me the Good Stuff
Primal-scream-style memoirs that contain all the petty details about long-held resentments and infidelity.
February 20, 2024; Crown
Raised by strict religious parents, Lenz married young to a man who refused to do housework and discouraged her from writing. Reviewers have balked at the way this memoir tries to universalize her uniquely abject situation —she brings in interviews with other skeptics (“marriage? It’s a pyramid scheme,” says one), historical research, and earnest pleas to the reader to condemn what she calls the “violent prison” of marriage — but there’s something invigorating about her righteous anger. “I want to tell as much of the truth as I can,” she writes. “Telling the truth is often a demolition project.”
February 20, 2024; Little, Brown and Company
The novelist and essayist and her husband, also a writer (referred to as C), were married within a year of meeting and separated just over a year after having a child. She reflects on it all with impressive tenderness and candor, even on the parts that make her look bad. “Our home was a place in which I’d come to feel alone,” she writes, “and so — in retaliation, or from depletion — I made C feel alone, too.”
July 23, 2024; Hogarth
This book — technically fiction but written during the author’s own “high-conflict divorce” — is as nihilistic about the institution as it gets. It records the soon-to-be ex’s every domestic offense with the exact contemptuous eye roll that Gottman Institute researchers warn against. “Even a decent marriage drains the life out of a woman,” the narrator writes. “It really is absolute shit, being a man’s wife.”
March 4, 2025; St. Martin’s Press
The ex-BuzzFeed writer’s first essay collection, published in 2017, “was lousy with details about how well he” — her boyfriend at the time — “had treated me, and how good we were together.” Her second is about how they edged their way apart in marriage, argument by argument and lie by lie. If it sometimes reads a little bloggy, it’s also blithely confessional in the way a good golden-era digital-media personal essay could be. When they were still married, “My husband hated that I wrote about my life, and by extension, his,” she writes. A memoir was inevitable.
April 22, 2025; Apprentice House
At the age of 60, after 14 years of marriage, DeLuca’s husband decided he wanted to have children and asked for a divorce. His sudden departure was followed by months of angst so dramatic that she suspected he might have a brain tumor. In his new relationship with a younger woman, “He was like a dog with a bone, actually a man with a boner, one that hadn’t popped up without Viagra in recent years,” she writes. It’s strangely heartwarming to realize that even sexagenarians can be this chaotic.
July 15, 2025; Henry Holt and Co.
This isn’t the first time Pittard has written about divorce: Her 2023 memoir, We Are Too Many, explores what happened when she found out her husband was sleeping with her best friend. (Her ex-husband, her ex–best friend, and her ex–best friend’s ex-husband wrote their own books about the same situation.) Her new novel follows a professor who learns her ex is about to publish one featuring a thinly veiled version of herself.
Sort of Self-Help
These authors came out of their marriages with a new perspective on life, and they’re ready to share their findings.
January 21, 2025; Bloomsbury
The mother-daughter team’s illustrated guide to post-divorce healing came about when Hopkins’s husband — Bateman’s father — reconnected with an old girlfriend and ended their 30-year marriage. It’s ordered chronologically with sweetly practical tips (start a journal; find a new favorite song; celebrate the day when the groove on your ring finger disappears) for raging, grieving, and moving on.
April 15, 2025; Flatiron
The former Mrs. Bill Gates recalls moments in her life that taught her how to “navigate transitions” and “embrace uncertainty” — including presumably tasteful anecdotes about her own multibillion-dollar split.
April 29, 2025; Crown
TikTok-famous Clare had a high-stress career as a photo editor and a lukewarm marriage with someone who wasn’t Jesus when when she started writing emails to nuns she found on the internet, confessing that she thought she might have a religious calling. Soon enough, she was throwing it all away for the sisterhood. As a nun-curious teenager, “I didn’t know any married people who were happy,” she writes. “I was a logical, common-sense kid, and to me, marriage looked like a scam.”
Formal Exercises
Breakups so bad they require a little poetry — or sociology, or an extended metaphor about becoming a mollusk — to process.
February 18, 2025; Viking
A cool appraisal of millennial divorce. What does it mean to leave an institution you never viewed with much piety anyway? As much cultural history as memoir, Mlotek’s book takes detours to talk about the unrecorded divorces of the 19th century, the unrecognized brevity of America’s postwar marriage boom, and movies like Waiting to Exhale. “Opponents of the Victorian philosophy warned that if love were the main reason for getting married, everyone would get divorced,” she writes. “They were right.”
March 4, 2025; Washington Square Press
Clark’s poetry is all in the details: the California-king bed she sleeps in alone after her divorce; the pulled-pork sandwich with Carolina Gold barbecue sauce she’s eating whensomeone at a party asks “if my husband left me, or if I left him.”
March 11, 2025; Farrar, Straus and Giroux
These selected works by the author of The Copenhagen Trilogy, written between 1939 and 1976, are worth reading for the breakup poems alone. “Husbands / fill up / the whole world,” one begins. “Block / the horizon / take charge / make / decisions / are everywhere.” Ditlevsen herself married and divorced four spouses.
June 3, 2025; One World
After Chen splits with her husband, an older man she had been with since her early 20s, her mother sends her repeated texts urging her to “clam down.” In response, Chen realizes — à la Gregor Samsa — that she is a clam, and she decides her clamped-shut mollusk nature could explain everything. It’s a lot less cutesy than it sounds.
June 17, 2025; Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Lacey (who was not married, but did share a mortgage with her ex-partner; close enough) takes an artfully sidelong approach in her memoir of heartbreak at the hands of a man she calls The Reason. Flip the book over and it becomes a story about two friends whose lives may bear an oblique relationship to Lacey’s.
Fictional Splits
Not autobiographical, just good old juicy divorce (or near-divorce) stories.
July 30, 2024; Henry Holt and Co.
A recent divorcée checks into a hotel with suicidal intentions, only to find out everyone else is there for a super-luxe wedding. Gently comic high jinks ensue. (Nicole Holofcener is set to write the upcoming movie version.)
March 18, 2025; Putnam
Freshly divorced in the spring of 2020, Rachel Bloomstein feels a strange new sensation: “It was desire. Rachel remembered it inchoately, the way you half remembered a smell.” Suddenly, she “wanted to fuck, and she wanted to fuck all the time.” Human sexual partners end up paling in comparison to a meticulously programmed AI chatbot.
April 15, 2025; Knopf
Separated from his wife, Steven Mills decides to find his father, who disappeared abruptly when he was a child. He’s unable to articulate the reason his own marriage has cooled so deeply: “I had pulled away, but I couldn’t say why.” Porter’s novel is astute about masculinity, shame, and the ways heterosexual matrimony can constrain both wives and husbands.
September 16, 2025; Graywolf
After living through several traumatic events as a child, including the murder of her father by police, Ruth changes her name, relocates to Kentucky, and starts a family. The end of her 20-year marriage is the catalyst for a long-delayed reckoning with her past.
Remember Sex?
After (or sometimes, regrettably, during) marriage, the deluge — in the form of newfound lust.
May 14, 2024; Riverhead
The novel that spawned a thousand group chats (and a potential Starz series) is a libidinal tale of a woman who posts up in a hotel near where she lives with her husband and child. Urgently needing to outrun menopause, she begins a journey of sexual discovery that threatens to dismantle her marriage, not that she really minds.
February 25, 2025; Viking
A Calhoun-ish writer assents to something like an open marriage at her husband’s urging. “You’re bad now!” he gushes when she kisses someone else, then he suggests they read Polysecure. When she develops a crush, her attempts to find “the elusive way between courting divorce and abandoning love” are less than successful.
March 11, 2025; Pantheon
This massive compendium of diaries by the cult-popular Australian author runs from 1978 to 1998. Garner had a yearslong destabilizing affair with a married man, then recorded the grim disintegration of her own marriage, which lasted even longer. “Being in love makes me selfish and mean, puts blinkers on me,” she writes. “I get tunnel vision. I want, I want, I want.”
August 5, 2025; Greywolf
What begins as a memoir about infertility becomes one about unexpected divorce. It morphs once more as Caldwell starts sleeping with women again. She muses as much on her narrative about-faces as on her fertility-clinic appointments and Tinder dates. Your satisfaction will depend on your appetite for memoirists who dissect their own book as they’re writing it. “If you’re writing about your life in real time,” she asks, “are you inherently fucked?”
Illustrations by Kimberly Elliott