My ex refuses to read (a draft of) my divorce memoir

and it's driving me low-key bananas

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman who writes a memoir about her life is going to field a lot of questions about how the people in her life feel about being written about.

There’s an endless amount of discourse on this topic, and a lot of it revolves around the question of what responsibility you have to the people in your life to let them see what you’ve written in advance. There are several camps on this issue, and writers I adore have written in defense of every possible position.

I really love what

lyz

wrote a while back in her post “What my ex thinks about the book”, which amounts to “I don’t know and it’s not my business or yours.” Philosophically, in general, I’m pretty aligned with that position: your memoir represents your own experience, and you shouldn’t try to speak to the experiences of others, so they shouldn’t really have a say on your narrative.

And there are risks to sharing. My favorite part of

Maggie Smith

’s wonderful memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful is the absolute gut punch of a chapter ‘The Edits’, about the experience of seeing her ex’s requested changes to her Modern Love piece:

His edits on the piece—I’m tempted to put edits in air quotes here—were more psychologically revealing than almost anything he said in couples counseling or to me privately. The recycling at the curb became “the recycling my husband took to the curb.” The cotton spiderweb stretched across our tree for Halloween became “the spiderweb my husband and children stretched across the tree.” He redlined—deleted—that he worked long hours, that I packed his things, that the money clip was a birthday present I gave him, that we had kept our wedding dishes in the dining room cabinets he took when he moved out. Most importantly, he redlined any instance of me crying.

It’s an incredible piece of writing. Part of me says it was worth her sending it to him just to get those notes, because damn. Fortunately, her editor encouraged her not to accept the changes.

On the other hand, you have Lilly Dancyger’s LitHub article “Why You Should Let Your Family Read Your Memoir in Advance.” Dancyger’s argument — which I also found extremely compelling — is that you can’t predict what people in your life will find upsetting in your memoir, and it often isn’t what you’d think. Letting them read it in advance gives you a chance to smooth out tiny, low-stakes (for you!) details:

When she finally read the book, my mother was hurt by some of the bigger elements of the story I told, as I expected she probably would be. But she was also hurt by some little details that felt almost insignificant to me. An example that sticks in my mind: She didn’t like that I referred to my loft bed in the studio apartment we shared when I was a teenager as being “above the kitchen.” It was next to the kitchen, she argued. Yes, I could sit up in bed and look down at the top of the fridge, but the space directly under my loft bed was not the kitchen—I had a desk under there, and a little storage bench. She felt that I was exaggerating how cramped the space was (and how poor we were) by saying that my bed was “above” the kitchen. I laughed when she pushed back on this little detail. Of all the fraught, painful things in the book, this was what she had a problem with?

But I also felt a twinge of regret. It would not have compromised the integrity of my story to change “above” to “next to.” I would have been happy to make that change, in fact, if it made her more comfortable with the story as a whole. But because I didn’t share the manuscript with her ahead of time, it was too late to make that adjustment, or any of the other small edits that might have softened the blow of the larger, hard-to-read story.

This is SUCH a good point. You truly, truly do not know what people will have an issue with. Most people who have read my memoir agree that my mother comes away from it looking pretty great, and she is. But it also has a scene with a very fraught conversation with her in the car before a personal training session. I share both the conversation itself and some deeply traumatic family history about a violent incident that forced my mother out of a job she was great at and proud of. My mother had no problem with any of that, but she disputed a somewhat throwaway line about how the reason we were going to the trainer together was because she didn’t like that I’d gained a bunch of weight recently.

I haven’t decided whether to keep that context or not — my mother’s attitudes toward weight and health have changed in the past decade, but I feel pretty confident that I accurately depicted what I thought she thought back in 2015. I think a lot of women my age have a lot of baggage around how diet culture impacted how their mothers felt and talked about their bodies (and maybe still do), and it’s worth calling it out and naming it, even in mothers who are wonderful and supportive. But my book is still very much in edits, so who knows what will happen.

But sending a draft of my divorce memoir to my mother, a minor character in the book who mostly comes away from it looking pretty good, is a different question than sending it to my ex, a major player in the central drama of the story who (I hope!) comes away from it looking like a complicated person who, like me, is often sympathetic and often an asshole. Like Lyz, I’ve gotten a lot of questions about what my ex thinks about my memoir. But my position is a little different.

While I don’t in general think people should feel that they need to share their divorce memoirs with their exes in advance, my situation is pretty specific. (I guess that’s true of every situation.) My ex and I are still close friends who joke about Sappho pickup lines together (although for the past 24 hours we’ve mostly been sending each other memes and satire about group chats, of which my favorite is this one from Reductress). She bought me one of my most prized possessions, this pillow:

We also co-parent not just amicably, but collaboratively as a team with my partner and his ex. More than that, I’m trying to tell a story about being an ally to trans people like her and our daughter. While I’m certainly not trying (and, indeed, not able) to tell the story of her transition, I can’t imagine not seeking her perspective on that very difficult time.

The key word there is “seeking.” Because, as I mentioned in the title: I can’t get her to actually read it.

In theory, she is very supportive. Sure, the first ten or so times I told her I was working on a divorce memoir, she nodded blankly and seemed to enter a fugue state — an impression reinforced a few weeks later, when she asked, “So, what are you working on these days?” When I said, “Still the divorce memoir,” she responded, “Divorce memoir?”

Honestly, who can blame her? If she told me she was going to write a divorce memoir about me, I’d probably endeavor to block the knowledge of that out of my head so I didn’t spiral into an anxiety Möbius strip. I’d also desperately hope that it wasn’t going to actually happen. Most book ideas don’t.

But eventually, as it became clear that this was really happening and as I explained bits and pieces of it to her and described how I planned to frame some of our stories, she warmed to the idea. I told her, basically, that I was hoping it would be read by the wives and mothers of trans people and might help them process some of the messy hard shit that people don’t talk about so they could come out on the other side as the supportive allies they want to be. Gender is hard. And if I can make the world a little better for trans people by helping cis women who want to be allies work through some of the harder parts, then I’ll feel good about that. I think she found that pitch pretty compelling.

But she still hasn’t read it.

Several times, I’ve asked her if she wanted/was willing to take a look, and she’s said that she was. The first time was probably when I sent her my proposal right before I went out on submission a year and a half ago. I think my thought process was something like, “This is the most stressed I’ve ever been in my entire damn life, so whatever she thinks can’t possibly make it worse.” Truly, everything people have said about how submission is a goddamn nightmare is true. I refer you to this piece by my wonderful agent

Anna Sproul-Latimer

:

Common Author Freakouts, Part 2: Toward the End of the Editorial Development Process

In that piece, Anna briefly mentions her “frenzied rabbit/frightened turtle” dichotomy. I definitely have some frenzied rabbit tendencies, although sometimes I can avoid a task for six months with the best of them. My ex, on the other hand, is pure frightened turtle when it comes to my book, because not only did she not read the proposal then, she didn’t read the manuscript draft when I sent it to her a year later. It’s been six months now. She promised me over the winter holidays that she was going to read it in January after she left her very stressful job, but then she didn’t end up leaving, so I can only assume it remains unread.

I’m sympathetic. Being a single mom with a demanding job is hard, and being a trans person and mother to a trans kid in the U.S. right now is extremely hard. And her avoidant tendencies aren’t exactly coming as a surprise to me, a person who has written a book in which those exact tendencies figure prominently. So it isn’t a shock that she’s somewhat reluctant to read a divorce memoir about one of the stickiest, most vulnerable times in her life.

But also: how can she not??? Maybe this is the frenzied rabbit in me talking, but: if I knew someone was writing a memoir about me, I cannot IMAGINE not wanting to read it. Well, “want” might be a strong word, but certainly I would feel compelled to read it as soon as I could. If they offered to send it to me, I would be continuously refreshing my inbox until it arrived, and then I would stay up all night combing through it. And if they didn’t offer to share it with me, I’d be even worse. I would be biting my fingernails down to the quick imagining what it said. I would be obsessing about it endlessly to my therapist. I would be trying to hack into their email to access it. I would be dressed up in a ghillie suit, standing outside their window, hoping to catch a glimpse when they typed in their system password.

As you can probably tell, I haven’t thought about this at all. I definitely haven’t thought about this 20x more than my ex, the person it is actually happening to.

Ultimately, there isn’t a single right answer to the question of whether you should share your writing with the people it’s about. And there isn’t a right way to feel about their reactions (or non-reactions, as the case may be), either. You can’t predict what those reactions will be, and you certainly can’t control them. Letting go of what I can’t control is still a work in progress for me. But I think that’s ultimately why we write memoir, isn’t it? Because people are so strange and unpredictable and bizarre and wonderful? The alchemy of the choices you make and how people respond: that’s humanity, and that’s what we write about.

Also, just so you all know: I sent my ex a link to a draft of this piece before I published it. She initially asked for a week to get back to me but then ended up reading it right away. We’ll see if that changes the timeline on her reading the manuscript.