When ‘We’ Becomes ‘I’: The Case for Divorce

SUCKER PUNCH: Essays, by Scaachi Koul

NO FAULT: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, by Haley Mlotek

I can’t recall the first time I saw “The Misfits,” John Huston’s 1961 cinematic masterpiece about a quartet of mutually disenfranchised wanderers, but I’m certain it was after I’d become a divorcée. I know it wouldn’t have stuck with me so permanently otherwise. Set in Reno, Nev., a city once as famous for its hassle-free divorces as its casinos, the film is a timeless meditation on what it means to lose.

I was not yet 30 when my first marriage dissolved, by which point I’d seen several friends’ relationships likewise buckle beneath the looming specter of forever. It seemed that every few years there was a wave of these breakups, and I began to predict them like weather patterns. “It’s divorce season,” I’d say, and if time has mitigated the phenomenon in my own life, I wasn’t surprised to find confirmation that it still wreaks its havoc elsewhere.

In two new nonfiction books, the authors Scaachi Koul and Haley Mlotek find their inspiration in the emotional maelstrom that follows divorce. Reading them in parallel, I was reminded not only of how hard it is to stay together, but of how painful it is to try to recalibrate who you are when “we” suddenly becomes “I.”

“Sucker Punch” is the follow-up to Koul’s 2017 essay collection, “One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter,” a book that she repeatedly references in order to address the “before” and “after” qualities of a failed marriage.

One cause of her marriage’s breakdown, according to Koul, was her self-confessed propensity for oversharing the intimate details of her life. (A hazard, perhaps, of contemporary culture writing.) “The internet is a record of my failures in so many ways,” says Koul, “but none more blatant than how the person I love most in the world and I failed each other.”