why doesn't she just leave him?
the novel that is driving me absolutely nuts right now
I love getting mad about things that aren’t real. But maybe the story at the heart of this novel is real? I’m not sure. Fiction or autofiction, regardless, it's ruining my week.
First, a bite-sized synopsis: a female writer, Jane, marries a male filmmaker, John. They both have creative ambitions. They get married. Shit hits the fan very early on. They have a child. Jane does almost all of the housework and childrearing. John keeps moving them across the country, starting businesses, and getting fired. Jane tries to convince herself she’s in a happy marriage until it’s clear she’s not.
Second, a disclaimer: I’m only 130 pages in out of 256 pages. I know that the husband is going to leave her, that, according to the cover copy, she’s going to rise from the ashes of her marriage. I want to see her ascent. I don’t know if I’m going to make it to the end, though.
The novel is framed as a feminist send-up of hetereo marriages, as a rage against your typical inequitable domestic dynamic. The book copy explains that, “As Jane’s career flourishes, their marriage starts to falter.”
It doesn’t say that faltering, in this marriage, looks like: this man calling her a bitch, screaming fuck you during arguments then storming out of the house, walking away while Jane is speaking, giving their child four times the recommended dose of ibuprofen, passing out drunk in the middle of the sidewalk with a concussion while Jane is pregnant, not giving her gifts on Mother’s Day, getting fired from his job three times after moving Jane and their child seven times in six years for these very jobs. When I tell you I’m sitting here like, wtf is going on.
This is all before Jane’s career flourishes so idk what the fuck that faltering is about to look like when it does.
I had to call my ex/bff about this: “Can you imagine calling me a bitch to my face?” I said. “Do you know what would’ve happened to you??????”
NPR calls the novel an ‘autopsy of a bitterly disappointing marriage.’ Can we define disappointing? It’s disappointing when Starbucks is out of soy milk. This man calls his wife a bitch to her face!!!!!!!!
John was a jerk from the beginning. This is not a story of a switch up, but a story of someone who showed their ass with the flagrance of a stripper.
I found myself frustrated and falling into the trap of, why doesn’t she just leave him?
Listen: I am a steward of nuance. I abide by the fact that novels are meant to play in moral murkiness. They are not instruction manuals for real life. Characters are not required to be liked for a story to work, for meaning to be made. Stories are multi-sided objects, human behavior transcends logic, we, all of us, fail ourselves and each other in the same, stupid ways.
And you know what? I’m still going to sit here and say, why didn’t she leave his ass?!?
Let me explain: early in the novel, John delays buying her an engagement ring because he claims not to have the money. Then he proceeds to buy six new custom-made shirts. This pattern of financial tomfuckery persists throughout the novel: he’s in serious debt but drops $400 on a fancy dinner. Jane decides to pause her career to move around the country for his job. She focuses on raising their child, becoming financially dependent on him. I want that decides to do a lot of work—some women, like single mothers, have no choice but to work full-time. To be clear, childrearing on its own is absolutely real work. Jane is working, she’s just chosen not to work a full-time job and, by making this choice, has become reliant on a man who from the beginning has displayed an absolutely lunatic relationship to money.
My take is ungenerous and prickly, I know.Why didn’t she just leave? It approaches the line of victim-blaming and peers over it. It’s a weapon wielded at women in toxic relationships, a justification deployed by systems and structures that refuse accountability in moments when intervention is possible. Women in physically abusive relationships are at a much higher risk of being killed if they flee them. Leaving is not packing a bag and slipping out of the door. It is planning in fear, taking a fatal risk, striking out often with nothing to their name.
There is verbal abuse in Jane and John’s relationship (he also pushes her and she slaps him). But the situation above does not appear to be Jane’s; John does not threaten her, he spends most of his time outside the house, flying around for work trips. As far as I’ve read, she never fears for her life or physical wellbeing. He is more of a jackass than a controlling abuser. She’s really the only one trying to remain in the marriage, trying to make it work. She has two living parents, her friend Hannah, a neighbor who knows of their dynamic. What I’m saying is Jane has brightly lit exits. She just fails to acknowledge them.
Here is why this novel is blowing me: I don’t like protagonists who act as if they don’t have any agency in their lives, even if that agency is negligible.
When John wants them to move for a seventh (sixth?) time, Jane says:
“I begged Hannah to tell John that I needed to stay in the neighborhood, even though we had to move, because I didn’t think I’d be able to convince him of it myself. He’d grown too good at ignoring me1.”
What? Convince him? You’re a 40-something-year-old middle-class educated professional writer and you’re telling me you can’t imagine any other route for you to stay in your neighborhood beyond asking your friend to ask your husband to let you stay? You’re grown!!! Move in with fucking Hannah while you sort it out if you have to since she’s all involved.
I do not mean this to say that people of a certain age or socioeconomic backgrounds can’t find themselves stuck in a bad relationship, can’t make poor choices, can’t feel truly trapped. What I mean to say is I expect that you have more resources to get out. What I mean to say is that this is a woman who has choices; I’m not sure why she’s acting like she doesn’t.
At one point, Jane even acknowledges the marital realities of women’s past:
“I thought about all the wives who had lived before birth control, before legal abortion, before the recognition of marital rape and domestic abuse, before women could buy a house or open a bank account or vote or drive or leave the house. I wanted to apologize to all the forgotten and unseen women who allowed me to exist, all the women I’d sworn not to emulate because I’d wanted to be human.”
This thought ultimately leads nowhere. I was hoping this might be the moment Jane recognizes she isn’t these women. That emulation isn’t fully possible because Jane can access birth control, buy a house, vote, open a bank account (get an abortion depending on the state). Jane is making a choice whereas these women were not. And so this apology she so desperately wants to make to them falls flat, even insults. Excuse my righteousness, but the reason I am so relentless, so adamant, about all this is because I think women today do have some responsibility to pass through doors closed to their predecessors. I do not honor women who were enslaved by playing prisoner to a man a century+ on. Those women don’t need me to apologize. What do I have to be sorry about when I am living for them?
I want to talk about agency for a moment. Agency doesn’t have to be expressed through radical gestures. People have varying levels of agency. People have varying beliefs about their level of agency. Jane has depression and this would absolutely morph her sense of agency, narrow her scope for what feels possible. It’s also clear, though, that her marriage is deepening her depression.
But Jane doesn’t really want to leave. She chooses what she calls restriction over freedom because restriction feels better to her (maybe this is one of the lies that gives the novel its name). But we’re subjected to her unending misery and disappointment and meant to feel, what? I already hate the husband. I hated him from the first few pages. What other emotion am I meant to have about this relationship? Where else is there for me to go in this suffocating marital landscape that keeps being tread and re-tread ad infinitum, observed and experienced through the eyes of a protagonist who has no protagonism?
The argument that this is all meant to mimic the repetition of domestic life isn’t enough for me. This is a novel. Where is the dynamism, if not in action, in Jane’s interior life? If I want to feel the ho-hum, humdrum misery of daily domestic life I can go wash my dishes and watch shit break all over my apartment that I have to call someone to come fix for $1,500.
Jane is upset about the same things and responds to them the same way: by popping tranquilizers and telling herself she’s happy while crying to John who rolls his eyes. In a moment when women’s choices are under attack, I’m sorry if I’m not in the mood to read about a woman blind to her own.
I talked to my therapist about this. She deftly articulated part of my frustration: Black women have never had full agency in this country. Agency was a thing we summoned from thin air, found in a cruel geography that hid it from us.
I was raised by a single mother who suffered from clinical depression. She worked full-time. Many Black mothers do not have the option to not work full-time even if they’re married. They’re often the breadwinners, the primary caretakers, not just of their own children but of other people’s children. The other day my mom said to me, “I’ve been working this same job for forty years. All I want to do is retire and travel, but I still don’t have enough money to do it.” This is a woman who’s always made good choices, who is entirely pragmatic with her money, who had one child because she believed, with her depression, she couldn’t handle any more than that, who refused to move a man into our house while I was living there (“I just wasn’t going to do it.”). She saw a limited set of choices and made what she thought were the best ones.
Jane is a good mother and she is doing more than she should in the home. Her marriage is occurring within the context of a sexist and misogynistic system of which she is a victim. She’s just not as big of a victim as she thinks she is. She is more responsible for the turn her life has taken than the structures she blames.
At the time of writing this, it’s the Paris Olympics and I assure you I’m disinterested in participating in the Oppression ones. I’m not a fan of critiquing work based solely on an author’s identity because that doesn’t affect whether the story itself is good or not. Every book has blindspots.
I may also just be tiring of middle-class marriage novels: I am truly over here like why does this piece of paper have y’all acting insane.
But there are just some stories by white women that upset me. That I can’t…’take seriously’ isn’t right. That I can’t take, at all. The fabulous New Yorker critic Parul Seghal also bristled at the author’s perspective on marriage:
“Heterosexual marriage itself is regarded as only questionably consensual. We are impelled to make this bad choice, Manguso added. The entire civilization is screaming it at us…from the cradle.
A little proportion, please. As the product of generations of arranged marriages, a number of them coerced, I find that such claims feel strange, if not obscene.”
Seghal seems to be saying something similar to me: I have seen how it looks to be truly without choice and so watching this woman feels painful, but not for the reasons the author hopes.
I have not made it to the end of the novel but I know that John cheats on Jane. He’s the one who leaves after she stays with him for something like 16 years.
As someone who’s dated an asshole or two, who has watched assholes ascend in the workplace, in politics, I have always felt strongly that assholes can only continue being assholes if there are people there to accept, enable, and embrace them. If everyone refuses, they’re simply assholes in isolation. If an asshole is an asshole in the middle of a forest and no one’s there to hear their nonsense, did the asshole make a sound?
What usually happens with shitty men is one lover leaves them and they find another. Why change when someone’s doing your laundry, booking your hotel, fucking you, cleaning your house? You’re reaping your ultimate reward, you’re living out your male manifest destiny, everything is going as planned!!!
This is not a plea for women to trigger transformation in men by leaving them or demanding different treatment. That would make this a story about the man and this is a story about the woman. This is a plea to kick this man to the fucking curb, to make his problems what they should’ve been all along: his.
Jane knows the kind of life she wants but it feels out of reach to her. How do any of us acquire the right tools to build the life we want insofar as the life we want can be built by our own hands?
Let’s make this about me for a second since, like all raging on the internet, this whole thing is really about me.
When I was sixteen, my friend and I took a cab to a house party in Maryland. This is before Uber. The cab driver dropped us off in Silver Spring, far from the party’s address, but expected full payment. We offered half since we’d still have to find a way to our destination. He responded by locking the doors.
I think of this story often because it revealed a side of myself that I hadn’t yet known. My reaction to this man locking us in his car was not fear. There was no fear in my body, and I am a fearful person. I felt anger. I felt entitlement. I felt the right to the life this man was threatening.
As John has showed us, there are many ways to take a woman’s life beyond killing her.
I rolled downed the window, jumped out, pulled my friend through it, and we ran. It was me or him. It was my life or whatever he had planned for it. I took my life with me down the street.
Jane moves through her marriage as though the life she wants will simply happen because she’s followed an old plot. She’s made a series of decisions that anyone could’ve told her would not lead to the life she’s imagined and yet, she’s disappointed when that life doesn’t materialize. Yes, her husband is a bad man and bad men have tried to take women’s lives since the beginning of time. Women have also always fought them off.
Women like my mother have never believed the life they wanted would come without a kind of violent agency—you took a knife and carved a space for yourself if there was no space. Holes appeared in your path and you clawed your way out of them. Freedom required constant defending, dreams demanded constant chasing. You took power because it was never, in your entire bloodline, a thing that was going to be given to you. It was making it work, days of let me get myself together-ing, of if there’s not a way I’ll find one. This is not superhuman strength. There is no Strong Black Woman. There is only not having any other choice.
Whenever my mom and I are watching a movie where some husband, stepfather, whatever, is mistreating his stepdaughter, wife, etc. she always turns to me—my bullish, bright, Capricorn mother—and shakes her head: “I wish a man would. You already know where his ass would be if he did that to us.2”
There’s a part where Jane admits that it turns her on when John ignores her and I just want to be like, baby gworl, there’s a whole kink for that!!!! Let’s find a way to explore this consensually and with parameters!!
He’d be in the ground!!!! under the jail!!!! under the oCEaN. GONE. NOT HERE. ELSEWHERE. DONE. FINISHED. FIRED. FORGOTTEN!!!
You should watch ‘It Ends With Us’, the movie that just came out, to see a modern take on women’s agency in relationships. Just saw it today and it moved me and changed what I thought of about the truth of this agency women have that you wrote about! You’re article was so very enlightening! Good job! ☺️