The more I read and watched, the more I wondered what I was doing. What did I need from these stories, or more to the point, what was I avoiding? What feeling or action did they allow me to replace? I believed everything I saw, even though I knew it wasn’t real, or even meant to be interpreted as real. I had a precipitous gullibility that I indulged, allowing myself a passive but committed dive headfirst into a narrative, or a character, or an end. No matter how often these concepts disappointed me by being exactly what they were (narrow, for one; embarrassing as a posture to adopt in real life, for another), I still held out a little hope. Maybe I just hadn’t found the right one yet.

In lots of fiction, divorce is not so much a genre as it is an event. Ending a marriage can be a plot point in a tragedy or farce or any combination of the qualities that make both; it can be romantic or dramatic, tearful or a celebration. On the other hand, there is clearly a small yet prominent kind of divorce narrative that could be called its own genre. The conventional marriage plot reminds us that love stories end with a wedding. Heartbreak stories have slightly more flexibility. They can begin or end with a divorce, or the question of separation can be the conflict that drives the entire story. But I do think that over time a clearer pattern emerges, one that intertwines the question of whether people define the law or the law defines people. Traveling backward from Levy and Gilbert, the contemporaries of divorce writing, to the gossipy novels of the 1970s and the bleak suburban despair of 1950s novels, I sense something that connects them together. I see the same in the glossiness of modern divorce movies that come alongside the pained dramas that reference custody battles or infidelities or other betrayals, to the grainy film stock of auteurs and independents, to the stark black-and-white depictions of toothy dialogue in the comedies of remarriage or the grayscale yearnings of Hays Code–era melodramas. It is a genre that knows blame without fully accepting it, a fiction that says: you cannot possibly fault me for telling you this, because either I have been honest or I have been right.