I am a longtime fan of Scaachi Koul’s newsletter “A List Of People I Am Mad At,” and in the run-up to my divorce I read her book “Sucker Punch,” which I also enjoyed immensely:

Initially I tried to find some fun in the way I told people, like when my friend Sarah chirped me on Valentine’s Day during a podcast recording.

“Scaachi, what’s it like to be loved on Valentine’s Day?” she said.

“I don’t know, Sarah,” I said. “I’m getting a divorce.”

Her face froze when she realized I wasn’t kidding (as did the four other people on the call, none of whom knew me at all). It was the first time I had laughed since my husband stopped being my husband. We were still living together at the time, still half in a pandemic.

It’s been four years since the last edition of this newsletter. What have I been up to? Got a job, still have that job, edited something like five books, started writing two or three, went to a lot of therapy and couple’s therapy, read a lot, changed my mind about having kids (now in favor), got a birth control implant because of my legendary lack of self control when it comes to the biological mechanisms that result in kids, drove a car for the first time in ten years, went swimming for the first time in ten years, got a cat, quit smoking at least three times, opened my marriage, met some interesting people, met some truly off-putting people, became very closely acquainted with several raccoons, nearly got hit by a car, nearly got hit by a tree, got my first ear piercing, got several tattoos, moved to Cincinnati, and got divorced. I’m missing several thousand things. What would be easier to list would be the things that have made me laugh since I got divorced:

• When Dylan and I decided to get divorced, Dylan took my other (much older) partner aside to say, basically, “Mom and dad still love each other very much and it’s not your fault.” I saw part of this conversation happening through the window (they were on the porch) and laughed so hard I nearly threw up.

• The other day my partner was trying to get a paper plate off the top shelf and bowls kept falling on him. Just endless bowls. It was like the paper bowl equivalent of the horrible Ted Cruz/Carly Fiorina squirmy handshake. “You’re laughing?” he said. “I’m struggling and you’re laughing?” I nearly cried.

• This one requires some context.

  • A few months before we got divorced — actually, in January I think, so eight months before — I made a list of events, patterns, etc. that I wanted to talk about in couple’s therapy. Fundamentally it was a list of things that, if we couldn’t resolve them, would present irreconcilable differences. For various reasons, it kept getting put off. Every so often we would have a “good” week, or at least one where there wasn’t some other crisis getting in the way, and I would try to bring something up off the list, and then that would become the crisis. Needless to say we never got around to it. We (Dylan, our therapist, and I) finally set a date to go through the list, we all logged onto the call, and — dead dove the first — something else came up. Less than 12 hours later we were getting divorced.

  • After Dylan told his parents we were splitting up, I wrote cards for his parents and his brothers saying, essentially, “I will miss you immensely and I’m very grateful to have had you in my life.” (Unsurprisingly I have not heard from them — dead dove the second.) I also wrote a card to Dylan expressing some private sentiments along similar lines.

  • I told my therapist that I had written these cards for my former in-laws, and I said, “I did one for Dylan too, and I wrote something like —” and while I was still trying to paraphrase, she said, “Was it the list?”

  • That was the hardest I’d laughed in months.

I know this contains the equivalent of 90 buried ledes. The truth is I struggle as a writer with the fact that my life is not a fixed canon — I say things as if they’re fact and then they change and I gain a whole new understanding of what they meant and where they were going and I don’t know what to do with it. It makes me feel unreliable, which as a narrator of course I am, but morally so, which I try not to be. I get squirrelly and weird and reclusive and then I pop back up once I feel like I have a handle on the narrative again and then my personal paradigm shifts once more and the whole mess repeats itself. It’s all very absurd. Sound and fury and so forth. But on the other hand it makes sense — I’ve always thought “ex-wife” had a certain ring to it. In any case I am afflicted with the writer’s terminal condition of being unable to shut up, even — or especially — when it’s uncomfortable and weird for everyone but particularly myself. Some parting thoughts on nothing in particular:

• “Spoiled Milk” by Avery Curran: Profoundly competent in terms of wordcraft and on a sentence-by-sentence level; a pleasure to read as an editor. Reminds me of an article about something else entirely that describes author Claire Messud’s writing as “gorgeous … like beautiful carpentry.” I have read some of Messud’s work and unfortunately I do not find carpentry particularly appealing to read, as it turns out, which is to say that the character work and plot do not keep pace with the wordcraft, but I will be watching this space.

• “Black Flame” by Gretchen Felker-Martin: Some vivid and well-rendered imagery but a little muddy thematically. Ultimately this is a homage to a number of movies I love that mostly steers clear of trying to evoke visuals the same way that a movie can — I rarely say this but I wouldn’t have minded if it was longer. It draws heavily from “The Hellbound Heart” by Clive Barker — the basis for “Hellraiser,” nearly titled “What a Woman Will Do for a Good Fuck,” by the way — which was a novella, but that only had about three characters if you don’t count the horny corpse. (Mr. the Frog, we all agreed not to sully the Priest with personhood.) More characters need more air to share.

• “Starfish” and “Blindsight” by Peter Watts: Incredible. “Blindsight” in particular is a lot of fun (if you enjoy having a bad time) to read in the current slop era. Note I did not say “Rifters” by Peter Watts; I recommend omitting the sequels.

• “Miami Purity” by Vicki Hendricks: Gorgeous. I hesitate to coin this phrase but whatever, why not: bimbo noir. I’ve been really enjoying women characters who camp it up and are just as led by their hormones and impulses as your average gumshoe who just can’t say no to a dame in trouble: see Sabrina Carpenter’s “busy woman.”

  

• On a similar note, I finally watched “Ash vs. Evil Dead.” Every lock-and-load montage where he fixed his greys with shoe polish or rubbed Ben-Gay on his neck sent me into a erotic frenzy. Where can I find more of this? “This middle-aged guy down the block from me” is an acceptable answer, for the record.