The Divorce Plot - Am I The Wrong Gender?

 Personally, I think why the divorce plot never crossed my mind, is that I did too much of that kind of work in a different life. 

But Mythic Appetites: On Meta-Desires, Marriage, and Meals in the Personal Essay by Kristen Malone Poli poses another possibility:

Why have these stories struck such a chord with readers? Perhaps their genre simply hasn’t gone out of style. After all, first-person accounts of women struggling with the material and metaphysical aspects of married life have long captured the popular imagination. Jamison and Gould, at least in their self-portrayals, owe a great deal to the likes of Emma Bovary and Isabel Archer, the beleaguered wives of 19th-century literary realism. With a lineage like that, some might conclude that the divorce plot will remain relevant for as long as marriage constitutes a social destiny for like-minded readers. Others might suggest that these essays simply repackage voguish heteropessimist themes in status tote bags. If men are trash, it’s fun to watch the trash get taken out. If heterosexuality is a gimmick, reading and writing prose about (straight) divorce can feel refreshing, if not outright redemptive. But one major clue as to why these essays have been so popular—and polarizing—lies in the pantries of their protagonists.

Another cause may that I would not see my own divorce as a source of creativity:

In addition to chronicling divorce and its portents, these essays examine the artistic development of their authors. Unlike Ephron’s book, they both crucially draw on elements of the Künstlerroman, or “artist’s novel.” In this context, sustaining the well-worn linkage between chronic hunger and creative ambition is a deliberate syntactical choice. Some critics might wonder if these semiotics, which combine the “starving artist” of myth with the self-depriving mother of materiality, contribute to a collective inclination toward disordered eating and thought. After all, if the deep-thinking, MFA-earning, chart-topping literary stars Leslie Jamison and Emily Gould are continually hungry, what does that mean for the rest of us? An image emerges of the archetypal, permanently striving female artist, whose blithe hunger toes the line between pathology and presentation. Will we ever, to borrow the language of Judy Chicago, “escape the plate,” even in prose?

 No, I am afraid that if I were to find in any creativity for me out of a divorce, it would be my parents' divorce.

sch 5/12