really good, actually (2023)
by Monica Heisey
“Maggie’s marriage has ended just 608 days after it started, but she’s fine – she’s doing really good, actually. Sure, she’s alone for the first time and can’t afford her rent and her obscure PhD is going nowhere… but at the age of twenty-nine, Maggie is determined to embrace her new status as a Surprisingly Young Divorcée™. As Maggie throws herself headlong into the chaos of her first year of divorce, she soon finds herself questioning everything, including: Why do we still get married? Did I fail before I even got started? And how many 4am delivery burgers do I need to eat until I am happy?
Maggie’s lack of self awareness is deeply infuriating and yet slightly relatable or if not relatable at least recognisable. I recognised aspects of heartbreak that I had seen (if not felt) before and as I read, I was reminded of reading ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’ by Elizabeth Smart, a poem that makes absolutely 0 sense unless read in the midst of despair when suddenly passages like, ‘I lounge with glazed eyes, or weep tears of sheer weakness. All people seem criminally irrelevant. I ignore everyone and everything, and, if crossed or interrupted in my decay, hate.’, that at one time sounded ridiculously dramatic, now speak to your innermost soul. Maggie is at rock bottom and so even though she does things that are objectively horrible like leaving a nice albeit dull man in the middle of a date without saying a thing to go home and have sex with a guy she just met at the bar or sleeping with her soon to be ex husband’s best friend, I kind of get it (to begin with.) I feel like this book perfectly captures how you can only be sympathetic to a friend going through a breakup for so long before you literally want to scream JUST GET OVER IT ALL READY!!!!
Heartburn (1983)
By Nora Ephron
“Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel discovers that her husband is in love with another woman. The fact that this woman has a ‘neck as long as an arm and a nose as long as a thumb’ is no consolation. Food sometimes is, though, since Rachel is a cookery writer, and between trying to win Mark back and wishing him dead, she offers us some of her favourite recipes. Heartburn is a roller coaster of love, betrayal, loss and most satisfyingly revenge.“
This book is by Norah Ephron, the screenwriter of two of my absolute favourite films of all time, ‘When Harry Met Sally’ and ‘You’ve Got Mail’ so I went into it wanting to love it and whilst it wasn’t a five star book, it was definitely enjoyable. Like ‘Really Good Actually’ by Monica Heisey and Ex Wife by Ursula Parrott (the third book I read), this is a work of auto fiction based loosely on the breakdown of Nora’s own marriage to Carl Bernstein. You cannot read Ephron without a pen in hand to underline passages, it’s wild because she writes about the most specific things that are also so deeply resonant like there’s a part where Norah’s mum has just died, “‘Mother’s gone’ said the nurse. Not ‘Your mother’ but ‘Mother.’ I stared at the nurse, stunned not so much by my mothers death, which after all had been promised for months and, as far as my father was concerned, was long overdue but by the nurses presumption. ‘You can call your mother Mother,’ I snapped, ‘but you can’t call my mother Mother.‘” This part spoke to my soul because it also drives me crazy when people to do this, I know a woman who is constantly like, ‘mum said this’ or ‘dad said that’ which is absolutely baffling considering the fact that we are not sisters! Of the three books I read, this one was definitely the funniest, whilst ‘Really Good Actually’ was pitched as a contemporary Heartburn, it missed the mark a little bit in terms of humour. There were definitely some funny parts but it didn’t capture the same wit that has made Heartburn stand the test of time.
Ex Wife
By Ursula Parrott
“New York, 1924. Patricia and Peter are a thoroughly modern married couple. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work. Both believe in ‘Love-Outside-Marriage’. Until they don’t. Or, really, until he doesn’t. So when Peter pushes for divorce with increasing violence, Patricia has to forge a new life as a single woman: as an ex-wife. A sensational bestseller in 1929, yet utterly timeless, Ex-Wife plunges us into the ‘era of the one-night stand’. It evokes not only the Manhattan bars, fashion advertising offices, female friendships and all-night parties of a dazzling city, but the hollow affairs, emotional hangovers, backstreet abortions, and struggles for sexual freedoms amidst the moral double standards of a patriarchal world.”
Despite being written in 1929 (in the height of the jazz age), this reads as remarkably contemporary, although it was initially published anonymously as it was deemed scandalous for the time. The similarities between the experiences of the women (and to an extent the authors) in all three of the books was interesting to read. I loved the fashion, the music, the dancing, the booze, so much booze but this was all interwoven with passages about, abortions, dead babies, domestic violence, sexual abuse, friends dying. Oh my goodness, the horribleness of men and the double standards but also the loveliness of falling in love and the terribleness of losing love.
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