À la carte (September 8, 2024)
Non-algorithmic recommendations
A book, a discourse, and The Bachelorette finale
Last weekend I tore through Liars by Sarah Manguso, one of several newish releases to center the “marital crises of white women in their forties.”1 In my particular strata of married, mostly white, women with graduate degrees, it seems like everyone is reading about marital dissatisfaction and divorce this year—in addition to Manguso’s novel, there is the provocative All Fours by Miranda July (which I must confess I have not yet read!), and a slew of memoirs by prominent writers, including Splinters by Leslie Jamison, This American Ex-Wife by Lyz Lenz, and You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith.
The plot of Liars is that a female writer marries a man who turns out to be a very shitty husband—the kind of shitty husband who undermines his wife’s career because he finds her success threatening, who fails to successfully execute a single domestic task but expects a thank you for trying, who uses work to escape domestic obligations (he lies about not having cell service in his studio!), and ultimately, cheats on his wife. They have a child together, and it takes too long for him to become an ex-husband. Much of the conversation surrounding Liars and its peers asks who is to blame for these shitty marriages—the awful husbands, the women who stay with them, or the patriarchy in which marital decisions are made. (Start with
’s excellent piece on her Substack if you’re interested in this conversation. I also enjoyed ‘s discussion last spring on this divorce moment.)
The husband in Liar, who apparently bears some biographical resemblance to Manguso’s own ex-husband, is a truly abominable partner. I recognized very little of my own marriage, I must confess, as un-smugly as possible. (The friend who lent me her copy of Liars previewed to me her own response to it, which was to confess “I do find myself sort of looking around and wondering if it’s weird I don’t hate husband’s guts.”) If anything, I am the bad husband in my marriage. You can hate my guts—while our child takes a blissfully long Saturday morning nap, I sit here writing after taking a shower, while my husband Swiffers the floors, waters the plants, and prepares a meal for friends with a sick child. But I know enough shitty men to believe that this kind of character is not a caricature. Though I’m not married to one, I only need to scroll through Instagram to be reminded of the shitty fathers and exes and former coworkers in my own social landscape—men who are adept at getting women to do work for them, at maintaining plausible deniability, at gaslighting, at lovebombing and ghosting, and refusing to take responsibility for their own actions.
The finale of The Bachelorette aired the day after I finished Liars. My relationship with The Bachelor franchise is complicated. I find the show problematic, but keep up with it the same way that my husband keeps up with sports—casually, privately, non-obsessively—in order to be able to partake in proverbial gendered water cooler chatter. Rather than actually watch The Bachelor (who has time?!), I usually listen to
and ’s recaps on Love To See It, on which the romantic arc of the show is just a jumping off point for incisive feminist commentary and cultural criticism. Unfortunately for the bachelorette herself—the franchise’s first Asian-American, Jenn Tran—this season resulted in stronger criticism than relationships. Not only did ABC only cast a single Asian-American man as a potential suitor (the franchise has long struggled to achieve any meaningfully diverse representation), but toxic masculinity was particularly overrepresented on this season. A number of contestants flamed out, ultimately leaving Jenn with two frontrunners who didn’t seem all that ready to commit to her on proposal day.Spoiler alert, Jen ends up alone, heartbroken by Devin, the contestant with whom she seemed to have the strongest connection for most of the show. Though Devin said yes to Jenn’s proposal on camera (she broke with convention and proposed herself! We love to see it!), he broke things off abruptly and without warning after a couple of months … over the phone. I found the whole thing rather triggering, to be honest, having incurred tens of thousands of dollars in therapy bills after an ex for whom I moved to California broke up with me by email in my twenties. Not even The Bachelor franchise can protect a woman in her twenties from a guy who comes on strong, professes to fall in love, make promises, and then cuts things off suddenly without explanation or apology. Don’t go watch the episode—we shouldn’t give ABC the ratings—but listen to Claire and Emma for a cathartic takedown of both the franchise and this shitty dude. Perhaps it was because I consumed the finale of The Bachelorette on the heels of reading Liars, but regardless of whether you think Manguso’s protagonist stayed in her marriage for too long, it is hard to see men’s failure to take responsibility for the emotional consequences of their actions as an individual, and not a structural, problem.
A podcast
Ben and I both loved this conversation between Ezra Klein and Jia Tolentino, on screen time, CoCo Melon, how children’s brains resemble adult brains on psychedelics, and what we want for our children—pleasure or achievement? We’re on the precipice of having to grapple with the question of screen time (yes or no? how much? what kind?) for our own daughter. I feel slightly liberated by Tolentino’s suggestion that these are maybe the wrong questions. I feel challenged by the notion that we should be skeptical of our preference for screen time to be educational, of our preference for Sesame Street.
CoCo Melon is the cotton candy of children’s content—it is somehow both too sweet and too lacking in substance—but we have already witnessed its placating effects on car rides where my daughter will not stop screaming. (If you aren’t familiar with CoCo Melon,
offers some other serious reasons to be wary.)
The needling voices of children singing against tinkly circus-tent instrumentals don’t just calm my daughter—they seem to drug her. I would rather listen to Raffi. My husband would rather listen to jazz. But Klein and Tolentino are pushing me to think about where these preferences come from, and why we are so worried about letting our children delight.
This only-slightly reductive description of this zeitgeisty subgenre comes from a review of Liars in the The New Yorker by Paruh Seghal, and is linked above.