honesty is a craft issue: lyz lenz in conversation with jeanna kadlec

two former good girls talk god, divorce, and writing

I will never forget the first time I met Texas-born-but-also-Iowan author and journalist Lyz Lenz.

This was a few years ago. It was my second-to-last day in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where my mom’s family is from. I had taken a long weekend trip to go see my parents, in spite of our estrangement, to talk to them about my memoir Heretic before it came out. I wanted them to hear certain things from me, face-to-face. The trip had started out better than I could have imagined, but then, so close to the end, we crashed and burned. All the reactions I had been so afraid of them having for years — not just to the book, but to me as a person — came flooding out.

I woke up after having gone head-to-head with them for hours, and the absolute last thing I wanted to do was meet a Twitter friend for the first time in person. To have to act like everything was okay when inside, I felt like I was dying.

But. I knew this would be my last trip to Iowa, and so also my last chance to spend in-person time with Lyz, for a few years. So I dragged my ass to (the now tragically closed) Rodina in Czech Village, where Lyz was sitting out on the patio with other friends, already drinking, dark hair piled on top of her head, enormous black sunglasses fixed on her face. When she saw me, she grinned and squealed. “JEANNA!” she exclaimed, getting up to hug me immediately. “We’re shit talking. Pull up a seat.” Her energy, and that of her friends, immediately told me: no need to pretend here.

Her other friends left soon after. We walked around Czech Village, which is genuinely one of my favorite places in the world. We found a secondary location and drank and talked for the next six hours. Of course, I told her everything.

Lyz is such a good listener, but she also shares herself. She doesn’t just soak in your experience; she is right there with you, being vulnerable in the trenches. She knows that some medicine is gonna hurt before it feels better, and also that laughter is healing, and also that these things are not mutually exclusive.

My soul felt lighter after spending the day with her; I got back on the plane to New York still heartbroken, but buoyed. Incidentally, that’s what the experience of reading her new book, This American Ex-Wife, is like. Like catching up with a new friend who feels like an old friend, who is holding you through one of the worst days of your life by sharing some of the worst of hers, and not letting you go until you’ve gotten a bone-crushing hug.

Not everyone can nail the emotions and spiritual experience just as well as they do the craft. So of course I wanted to talk to Lyz for the newsletter. You should know that the scene opens with us more than half an hour into a conversation. We just… wander from there. This is more conversation than anything. I hope you enjoy. Goodness knows we did!

this interview has, if you can believe it, been edited for length

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Lyz Lenz: So I got this Annie Ernaux book, and it’s the first one [of hers] I’ve read. The Young Man. It’s really short; she's talking about this love affair with a man 30 years younger than her. Cool. Good job, Annie. 

Jeanna Kadlec: Good job, Annie!

LL: Obviously it doesn't work out. It's intense and short and fiery. And at the very end, she goes — and obviously it builds up to this — but she says, “It was the autumn, the last of the 20th century. I found that I was happy to be entering the third millennium alone and free.”

And I was just like, god, it feels so good.

JK: I love that. What a gorgeous passage. And what a gorgeous introduction to you, to transition more into an interview. I love and adore you, but on the off chance that other folks who are reading may not have not somehow stumbled upon your brilliant newsletter or your previous work, if you could just share in your own words who you are and what you do.

LL: My name is Lyz Lenz. I am an author. I'm a journalist. I write a newsletter. I really try to focus on the places our personhood and our politics meet. So in those messy places of religion and reproductive rights. And then this next book [This American Ex-Wife] is about divorce, and that’s also a very political topic, and marriage is too. 

That’s the argument that I make, is that America — and a lot of places, but let's just talk about our own shit — uses marriage as a social safety net. I'm really trying to untangle those political and personal narratives [around] what we believe about love and what home and life should look like. 

Obviously, since the book is titled This American Ex-Wife, it should be an indicator of where I'm going with the argument. But yeah, that's who I am. I live in Iowa. I have two dogs and two kids.

JK: And you are a wonderful friend, a brilliant conversationalist, very funny. I think people should always read your writing. 

I read a very, very early draft of this book, and I read it in one sitting.

LL: It was messy. 

JK: It was messy at the time, but I still blew through it. And I think that speaks to how propulsive and how moving and necessary — I hate when my own work is described as necessary, but there is so much in your work that so many people, I think, will be able to relate to on a very personal level but also, like you were saying, [because] this [is] very relevant for the still very Trumpian state of our country. And like, you live in Iowa. He just won the caucuses last night.

LL: The thing that interests me about our romantic narratives is that, yes, there is this big backlash in conservative political culture [where marriage is the solution]. A literal thing that happens in the state of Iowa [is that] when you go on SNAP benefits, they send you a letter about how to make your marriage better and stronger. The implication being that if you’re married, you’re not on SNAP. It’s in this Republican congressional plan to strengthen America [note from Jeanna: quite literally; Lyz has written about the RSC’s “Blueprint to Save America,” released in 2022, where hetero marriage is explicitly outlined as an economic policy]. It's to take away, quote unquote, welfare and to support the heterosexual American family. And there is that, yes. 

But there’s also these neoliberal narratives that we, too, believe about this. I actually am a little delighted sometimes when a really progressive woman will look at you and be like, well, don't you need a man? Or like, I'm so miserable, I have this horrible marriage, but I couldn't give up the house. [Cause then] I’m like, oh, you've never been poor. You know?

JK: Oh my god, yes.

LL: It’s just like, oh, you're so wedded to these ideas of financial success and what a marriage looks like. You are really willing to nail yourself to that cross, aren't you? And then when you say to women, you can get down from that cross, we need the wood, right? Like, don't worry about it. They won't do it. 

JK: Girl.

LL: They will not do it. They'll throw their whole lives away for some tech executive.

JK: I so appreciate that you say that, though, because you've spoken so much about this, and obviously, your book is called This American Ex-Wife. You're divorced. I’m divorced. We’re both part of the divorcée club. 

But you have also written, both for the wider media and also at your newsletter, Men Yell At Me, about being a single mom, about being a single woman, and about things like the marriageability gap and just significantly about the backlash that women face when occupying one of those positions. 

And I think of how much — I don't have a more eloquent way to say it than shit you've gotten online, specifically, not even for the broader work that you've done around abortion and reproductive rights politics in Iowa, but specifically when talking about what you're saying here about women refusing to engage with the economic proposition that is marriage.

LL: And refusing to see it as such. I feel like right now, in America, it's really cool to be like, my husband sucks. But there’s no and. It’s like, okay, great, you just made 50,000 viral TikToks about how you hate this man and how he cannot locate ketchup in a grocery store and how you are raising your mother-in-law's son. And yet, you will not do anything to reclaim your life. You will not do the things that you need to value your contributions and your own humanity. 

I've only really written two pieces about single motherhood; I'd love to write more. But the first time I did it, it grew out of this dissonance that happened during the pandemic when people would say, oh my God, you're a single mom, ARE YOU OKAY? And I was like, I'm a little lonely because I don't have family around. But I'm actually doing great because I have time to work. I have shared custody. I don't have to share a house. 

Statistically, single moms — even if they have sole custody of their children — still have more free time than married moms. Keep that in the back of your mind. 

JK: I didn't know that.

LL: *laughs* My kids can also quote to strangers that the average husband adds seven hours of domestic labor to his wife's life. 

So I wrote this piece about how I loved being a single mother, and I came to that love accidentally, because when I left my marriage, I didn't expect happiness. All I knew was that I was miserable and I needed a change.

Single moms in movies, in books and TV shows: they're broke, they're hairy, they're looking for a man. I was all of those things, but it was kind of fun? It wasn't the bummer that it was made out to be. I realized that I was a better mom, a better friend, a better human. I really began to enjoy motherhood in a way that I hadn't before when I was married, because I felt like I could be my whole self with my children in a way that it had been tampered down in my marriage. We could just sit and could watch Survivor without worrying about what the other partner will say about swear words. 

Then I started looking up statistics and saw that across the board, across the political spectrum, both Republicans and Democrats think that single moms are a societal problem. Why do we think that? It’s poverty. So why do women get to this place? What it led me to see is that we have a system that punishes women for getting free, and then we punish them again because they need some help, because they had the audacity to get free. So I wanted to write about this narrative, to reclaim it. Or to claim it. 

JK: That’s such a powerful testimony. 

LL: I wrote a follow-up, because, you would think that the people who subscribe to a newsletter are engaged, right? I had a lot of men specifically get very angry — which is funny because that's the title of my newsletter, and then people are always like, change the title of your newsletter, and I'm like, I will when you stop getting angry at me! 

But people who pay for this newsletter got furious at me, that I dared to suggest that women could be fine without a male heterosexual partner. That perhaps that they weren't really adding as much as they thought to their partner’s lives.

The defensiveness and the rage that it untapped was really fascinating to me. Rage doesn't scare me anymore; I get interested. Tell me what's behind the anger while you're spitting in my face.

JK: What button did it push?

LL: I want to know, because I want to push it again.

JK: I really admire what you do at your newsletter, as someone who has such a large platform, because you do take on a lot of issues and you're very comfortable, it seems, being the face — perhaps sometimes the unwilling face that did not sign up — [for major issues] that thrust you into the limelight. [And you end up] being the lightning rod around some of these conversations in digital space and also real space. Like, I will never forget what Joe Biden said to you in 2019. 

LL: I do have a spiritual gift for really bringing out the insecurities in people. I'm not trying to make myself sound cooler than I am. 

JK: At a certain point, it’s a pattern!

LL: And we all have different personalities. I'm one of eight children. You know I was raised in a loud, screaming household with chaotic siblings and chaotic parents, with some mental illness thrown in. I learned early on how to deal with the tumult, and then I learned a little bit later how to go for the jugular. My dad's a lawyer. He's really good at going for the jugular. So is my mom, but in a more subtle, southern lady way. You can never out-mom my mom; she's always going to be one up on you. 

JK: You learned from the best. 

LL: I learned from the best. And then I think we all have this, right? where [we learn that] some of our best skills [can be] liabilities. I learned early on that my mouth was a problem. The way I said things was a problem. I remember being a kid and just saying things and everybody getting mad at me, and I'm like, I have no idea what I said. I thought we were just talking! 

We’re taught early on that the best parts of us are the worst parts of us, and that we have to push them down. But [I’m] reclaiming those quote unquote bad parts of me: the parts of me that are unafraid, that know how to go for the kill shot. 

So I know that I'm going to be okay. I didn't come up through journalism in a traditional way. I don't have a career because I worked for the New York Times, although they have published me and the editors I’ve worked with are great. But I'm here because I built a voice and a platform outside of those traditional means. That’s where I get my power from. 

I don't want to spend my life afraid. I don't want to spend my life wishing I would have said something or done something more. I'd rather go balls to the wall and put it all out there! I can always work at the Mexican restaurant down the street. I'm not saying that to be flip. I worked at a coffee shop through college. I can make this life work. I've been broke. I know what it's like to hustle. I'm just not afraid. And I wish more people were less afraid.

JK: Mmmm. Mmmmm. *church hands* Yes. The fear that keeps us trapped in what's purportedly the safe and society approved path.

LL: I want to say, you were talking about this in your newsletter, where you were having people talk about how they write about family. And I wrote you a lot.

JK: You wrote me a long thing about it that came in right after I sent out the newsletter. 

LL: I know! I never respond to email! I'm the worst, because I can't be good at everything. *both laughing* 

JK: Because we've talked so much about our families and about our relationships, is why I wanted to ask you about that. 

LL: But this was a fear. For me, this is one of those things where I can see it in other people's writing, where you are writing around your family and writing around people like they’re minefields. And that's not honest writing. To me, that's a craft problem. Honesty is a craft problem, and if you cannot be honest on the page, then don't write it right now. Write something else. Do not write in such a way where you're trying to make other people happy. If you're doing that with your family, you're not telling a good story.

JK: You're not ready. 

LL: You're not ready. 

JK: If you're protecting them — 

LL: Yes. Your writing is not protection for anyone, especially yourself.

JK: Something that we've been using a lot of in our conversation so far, that always happens when we talk, is a lot of biblical metaphors and whatnot. Even though [our respective upbringings] were very different, our shared experience of evangelicalism is a really foundational piece of where we're both coming from in our understanding of womanhood, of breaking out of particular kinds of marriage. 

Certainly, this informs a lot of your work, like with your first book, God Land, which is so fucking brilliant and which I think everyone should read, but I think whereas God Lfand, to me, it's sort of structured in the rubble of your marriage, but then we very quickly are going out in this journalistic way, landscaping of religion in the Midwest. It’s a very properly journalistic book, with a memoir B story, but This American Ex-Wife is much more of the deep, meaty memoir, long lens view of marriage now, in hindsight. 

I ended up sort of combining two questions there that I hadn't intended. I wondered if we could dive into your history with growing up religious, because my question with that actually is how your history with the Bible perhaps informs your relationship to reading and literature and language. But then also, the religious foundation of the book.

LL: I think people make a mistake when they try to see religion as separate from literally anything. I grew up Baptist in Texas, homeschooled, one of eight children. My mom's a big reader. My parents are very intelligent. Books everywhere. I blame the Bible for [a lot] because you give kids this tome [to learn], and it’s like, hell fire! People are getting raped! Naked men getting drunk in tents! Ghosts! The Torah is wild as hell. And it’s literature. You learn early that the Psalms are poems. 

It pulls you into this really intense relationship with text, because you’re always trying to reconcile yourself with these words. Here’s a book, here’s your life, how do these things weave together? And I'm Type A, so when they were like, read the Bible in a year, I was like, six months, and I'll do it again! Why would I do that?

JK: To win. To win at Christianity.

LL: YES! Yes! To be the good girl! And we all know that that doesn't really work out.

Text shaped the reason why my parents had eight children, the reason why we homeschooled. It shaped the very fundamental nature of my life, but it was also an escape for me too. Reading was the way I got away from the tumult of the family. I think that's it's such a formative way of how I became a writer, too. 

JK: When did you decide you were going to become a writer?

LL: I decided I was going to become a writer my senior year of college when one of my younger sisters — and I've written about this a lot — but one of my younger sisters told us that another family member had sexually assaulted her, and [his action] just tore the family into pieces. Everybody just went scattering and scurrying, and it was this crazy, horrible time. 

I made two decisions then. One of my sisters was my ride to take the LSATs because I was going to be a lawyer, so I just didn't show up. I didn’t go.

The other choice I made was to get married to the person who I was dating at the time, because he was very stable. Still is. But it's just like your relationship with the text. Sometimes stability can be a trap. Sometimes your escape is also your prison. You’ve got to be careful which cage you're running into and which cage you're running out of. 

JK: Mmmm. *deep breath*

LL: My newsletter editor said to me, I can tell you grew up Baptist, because you put so much alliteration in your writing just unconsciously. She's like, you're always looking for that sermon rhythm. And I'm like, that is true, I am!

JK: It’s in your bones, though, at a certain point. 

LL: Yes.

JK: I've just embraced it. I think this is part of why your writing is so resonant with me is because the rhythms of it feel very familiar. A lot of other people who I don't know initially are exvangelical — like Leah Johnson is one of these people, she's ex-Pentecostal and [when I found that out] I was like, oh, of course she is, because, the rhythm of the work has that sermon-like quality. It's so potent and so powerful. If you have it, you just have it. 

LL: And people respond to it, even if that's not your culture. Like, people love TED talks. What do you think a TED talk is? 

LL & JK: *in unison* IT’S A SERMON.

LL: It's a sermon for atheists! Good for you! 

I do this thing where I’m like, oh, it’s so youth pastor-coded. Someone will say, there’s this podcast and it’s so profound. I’ll listen to it and go, youth-pastor coded! This is just, you went to youth group in your ear holes! Even if you've never been to youth group in your life, that's what you just did. 

JK: This is something that I encounter a lot in the spiritual and occult space, is that there's so much crossover, technique wise but also sometimes belief wise [with evangelicalism]. It’s [a lot of] the same [dogmatic] ideology without the “Jesus is the only way.” 

LL: And there's nothing wrong with belief. We all search for meaning. If we're finding it through science or poetry, I think that's fine. What bothers me is when we judge other people's forms of seeking, or when we use our own personal belief systems to kill other people. 

JK: Seems like a pretty basic tenet to hold!

LL: And yet! I’m looking around at the news and what’s going on in the world. 

JK: Can I ask what spirituality is to you in this moment? And if it relates at all to your creative practice.

LL: People asked me that question after God Land, because God Land ends with me at a church, a very wonderful Lutheran church, and they were like, oh, are you Lutheran now? And I was like, I don't know. I found meaning there. It was a great space to help me untangle some of the things that I believed and saw new ways of thinking and believing. 

But then, the pandemic shut down churches, and I stopped going. I had never really given myself permission to stop going to church. I still believe in community. I believe in people coming together to do good. I believe that it was important for me to reshape and reheal and reclaim the role of religion in my own life. But when the pandemic shut down churches, I was suddenly free to go for walks on Sundays, to sleep in, to find a new way. 

[My kids] would say, why aren't we going to church? And I would say, there's a virus. I would say, church today is outside. Church today is snuggling in bed. Church today is. And that made sense to them. Church today is a sacred thing that we will do. [It] became this refrain that I would do in my head over and over: what is church today? 

It really bothered my kids for a while, because their dad is very religious. They would say, why aren't we going to church? And I would say, there's a virus. Their dad was making different choices, as is his legal American right. I would say, church today is outside. Church today is snuggling in bed. Church today is. And that made sense to them. Church today is a sacred thing that we will do. [It] became this refrain that I would do in my head over and over: what is church today? 

Now when I think of my spirituality, I still think I believe in something bigger than me, and I don't know what that is. If you really yelled at me, I would maybe in the end say community. What am I contributing to my community in a way that's trying to make things better? I've joined a couple boards [such as the Iowa Abortion Access Fund]. I’m part of a mentorship program at NYU. Last year, a bunch of the newsletter people ran Relay Iowa, and we were able to raise over $5,000 for health care for trans youth in the state. That’s something bigger than me. And that's what I think my spiritual practice is now, is just trying to find ways where I can use the gifts that I have to help out people around me.

JK: And that’s a profoundly sacred thing, right, is just being in community with other people. I think a lot about how whatever the antithesis is of white supremacist capitalism, is what is sacred. What puts us in community with the land, what puts us in community with people, what prioritizes people's well-being and their health. 

LL: I remember reading Candide by Voltaire and being so angry at the end. The main character is like nope, you just tend your own garden. You can't get involved with the crazies, you tend to your own garden. I remember being like, that fucking sucks, man! Get out in the world! I don't care if this is a brilliant satire! I hated it.

But now, I think I understand better. What it means is you find the thing that you can do, the good that you can do. It's going to look different than anybody else's. And so when people are like, oh, I'm despairing, I can't. You cannot solve all the problems, but you have skills, you have talents. They're probably the things you think are the worst things about yourself, by the way. 

JK: Thank you, Christianity. 

LL: Just pick a thing and do it! Be in community with others, because that's the antidote to despair, is community and sharing meals. It doesn't have to be that complicated. Just be forcing all your friends to come over to your house and drink, you know? 

JK: To this point about community, something I really love that you do in the new book is the craft choice you make to include interviews and stories with so many other divorced people. It’s so powerful. I'd love it if you could talk a little more about that and what went into that.

LL: I try to be journalistically rigorous. Both my first two books were rigorously fact checked. This one was fact checked, but it was part of the editing process, so a little bit different. And I'm adding that caveat for this book because of these interviews. 

I’m going to quote another book to you, Sarah Manguso’s new book Liars that’s out in June: “Elegies are the best love stories because they are the whole story.” The only honest writing about a relationship is its obituary. Because we are not honest. We cover for our partners little pettinesses and we learn so early on — sorry to be gender essentialist again, but I think it still holds power as a narrative because we live in a culture that is gender essentialist, so just to caveat that. We learn early on that you fix men’s shit. You cover up for men's shit. 

Like, I love my friends. I'm so honest with them. But there were things about my marriage that I had for 12 years, and I was friends with them before I got married, and I'm still friends with them now, but I was not telling them because I knew if I told them the truth, they would go, why are you there? And I did not have an answer, except for: I don't think I'm allowed to go. 

What happens is when you write about divorce, or when you put up, I got divorced on Facebook, people flood your inbox and DMs. It’s all women, and they want to know: how did you know? How did you get out? What did you do? Should I leave? Same question. Every time. 

So I was writing about my divorce — like you said, it’s the background of the book God Land, because God Land is a book about ruin. It's a book about the dregs of religion in its changing form. It's about America immediately post-Trump election. It's about the ruin of my marriage. So it's about ruin in the Midwest. Just devastation. Bombed out crater. 

But while I was writing that, I wasn’t publishing sections of it in real time. It was almost a full year after the divorce papers, after I had moved out, and [then] a month before the divorce papers were finalized [that] I finally wrote something for Glamour about being divorced. It was called “Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Making Dinner for a Man Again.”

JK: I loved that essay so much.

LL: Thank you!

But what happened because of that, and what still happens because of that, is [that I started] hearing from women everywhere. Everywhere. DMs, emails, Instagrams. People talk to me on the street about it. People still talk to me about it! 

So when I went to sell this book, because I wrote another book [Belabored: A Vindication of the Rights of Pregnant Women] in between these two books, I had all these notes; I collect things in these chaotic Google documents. That’s how I begin the process of turning them into books. Copy a quote from something, copy an email link, put all in this big messy file. 

And I had all these stories and experiences. But what would happen is [that] women would tell me these profound experiences, and then they would go, but you can't put that in the book. And I know why. Because of litigious exes. Because of fear. Because of children. Because some of the women I write about have not yet left their marriages. 

It's really hard to grapple with the effects of honesty. Honesty is powerful and it can ruin your life, and that's why it's so scary. So when I sat down to put these in, and I wanted them to be like When Harry Met Sally, when the couples sit down and talk about how they met, but I wanted it to be like women talking about how they left.

JK: I love it.

LL: In the draft you read, they were long. It really wasn't coming out. It was a little haphazard. And the editor was like, you have to cut these. And I was like, no! It’s the Greek chorus. I need them there. Not for word count because bitch, please, I can fill a word count, but because I wanted to create this space that [felt] like a chorus of women. Because when you are so lost in your own misery, you think it is a you problem. But when you can hear the voices of other people around you, you realize that it is a societal problem, right? 

That’s why the consciousness raising groups of second wave feminists were so powerful. Because women sat in a room, they talked about reality, and they realized it is not just me. I am being gaslit by my husband and society. That’s what I wanted to do again. I wanted to create spaces for these stories. 

But because I’m a journalist, I was also like, I should keep them as accurate as possible. And what happened was, as I fought to keep them in there, I realized a couple things. I needed to protect these women. It was also okay if I changed some details.

I didn't want it to just be me, because I didn't want this whole book to just be a memoir, because when you read a memoir about a divorce and you're married, you think, well, at least it's not as bad as those guys have it, right? At least he doesn't do this. You do not get excuses when you read my book. There's no excuses.

JK: There's so much to be said, too, about how that particular craft choice of including the Greek chorus, as it were, of fellow divorcees slash women who are intending to leave speaks to that spiritual value of community. Speaks to that, no one is an island. We're not alone. We are in this together And one person sharing their honest story can really inspire that in someone else.

LL: I have a friend who is featured in one of those stories, and she got out of Iowa. She moved to D.C. She has this beautiful, wonderful job.

But she started this podcast with this woman who’s getting divorced, and she told her, oh you need to read Lyz Lenz's book. And the woman goes, I read her article from Glamour and emailed her, and she sent me back a long email telling me how to find a lawyer, how to find a therapist, and how to get the hell out of my marriage. And [the woman my friend works with] said, now, four years later, I am getting divorced because of that advice. 

That’s what I want to do, is to have those real conversations. I want women to be happy. If you are so trapped that you think an internet stranger has the answers, I'm going to honor that. I take that responsibility very seriously when I get those emails and messages.

JK: I think that's really powerful. That you also take that tack rather than the oh, they're bothering me tack.

LL: Some people do bother me, but it's not people being nice and being scared and worried.

JK: People who are genuinely in need and needing to leave.

LL: You can tell the difference.

JK: You can. I do want to check in on time, because you’ve had a very intense 72 hours. Dear God.

LL: You can keep this in or not, but I do think people need to know that I had to get back from New York to Cedar Rapids after flights had been canceled. All these airlines, all these airplanes have been grounded, which impacted United. And guess who's been flying United? This bitch. It was just like this confluence of bad weather, blizzards, no planes. Staying awake for 24 hours. Also traveling with somebody who is emotionally exhausting. It went into this Odyssean journey where I went from Newark to Albany to Chicago and then drove a Jeep Gladiator in the middle of the fucking night to get to Iowa. 

JK: You are giving incredibly good interview for not having slept in 24 hours. 

LL: I got two hours of sleep before I had to go pick up my dogs. 

JK: Part of why I'm JUST TWO MORE QUESTIONS is because I'm like, I'm not going to get to interview Lyz again for a while!

LL: You will, you will. Let's do it! I cleared my calendar. I got all my work done today, and I said, I'm taking it as a sick day. I got my big sweater on. I was watching True Detective. 

JK: You said something earlier about honesty being a craft choice, which I really wanted to pick up on. Just to ask how you got to a point where that was a craft choice that you could be making with such ferocity, shall we say, especially in this new book, which is tonally, like you said, significantly less journalistic than your other books.

LL: I really wanted it to be that way. When I was trying to sell this book, it went out on auction. A lovely, lucky thing to happen. There was a lot of editorial feedback that was just like, take yourself completely out of the narrative. Do this as straight journalism. Go interview these women and write about it from this perspective. 

And I said no, because that's not the book I want to read. I don't think that that sounds interesting. If somebody told me it was interviews with divorced women, I wouldn't pick it up, even though I am a divorced woman. That sounds like boring journalism! 

When I sit down and look at what I'm writing or what I want to write about, I think about why do I care? Why does anybody care? What should make somebody care? For me, when I approach my writing and the things I think about when I read, it’s just: what are the personal stakes? It’s easy to tell with a mystery novel what's at stake: whether we find the killer or not. But with journalism, it's not easy to know what's at stake. It's also not easy to know why you should care. 

So I was really intentionally focused on making this story feel like you were sitting down with your friend, having a glass of wine and commiserating. I want it to feel angry. I want it to feel hopeful. I want it to feel delightful, in that way when you're with your best friends and you're crying over wine about all the bad things that have happened, but it’s somehow the best night of your life because you're in community and you feel so loved? 

I wanted it to feel like being in conversation with a friend who loved you. I wanted it to feel gossipy. I wanted people to be like, and THEN what happened? I’m just going to be real honest, I am a nosy bitch. I know everything that happens in this town all the time. It's my favorite fucking thing when people will text me from a restaurant to describe that they are seeing somebody break up in real time. Do that to me more. I love it. 

I know what makes me care, and I know what makes me want to pick up a book. So I really wanted it to have personal stakes. 

But how did I get to this point? There's a very specific story, and that is when I got married and moved to Iowa. I had worked for the college newspaper, and I'd had a couple professors — actually, not a couple, just one. I wasn't one of those rising stars where people were like, one day she'll make it big. They were like, she literally will not stop talking. 

JK: That’s also a narrative arc.

LL: I love to tell a story, as we know. 

As often happens to wayward writers, I went to an MFA program, and I really loved it. It was the Lesley MFA program — perfect program for me. I'd been rejected from all the fancy ones multiple times, just brutally, because I never know when to quit. I ended up going to this place that was low residency, which meant I could get out of Iowa. I was writing novels. I had — I guess they still exist? — two novels that I brought there, and I was writing short stories.

I had this advisor, Wayne Brown, who passed away the last year [of my program]; he died of cancer. He’s just this really great poet and nonfiction writer, but also a six, seven foot Black man. And I’m a white mom. He’d always give me writing advice at this bar, Cambridge Common, in [Cambridge, outside of] Boston.

JK: Ugh, I love Cambridge Common.

LL: And he would drink rum and Coke after rum and Coke, and it didn’t faze him. It was just [such a] writer experience. 

I remember him looking at one of my stories. I would have this problem where it just didn’t feel right. Like I did everything perfectly, but there was something missing. And he looks at me — he just had this deep voice — and he goes, you know why you write fiction? And I was like, I don't know, because I like it? He goes, No. Because you're too afraid to tell the truth. He's like, learn how to tell the truth, and then you're going to fix your writing. 

And he was so right. I mean, he could probably see through me. I was a 25 year old married girl from Iowa, you know what I mean? He probably saw exactly what was going on in my life. I know that if I had met me at that time, I would have seen it, too. 

I was trying to write about my family, and so I was trying to write honestly about what happened with my sisters, and sisters are complicated and wonderful. I was trying to find a way to say, this happened, in a way that sexual assault can be so gaslit. I needed to do it for my sister. I needed to do it for myself. Years after being able to tell the truth about that, I was then finally able to tell the truth about my own assault, which I had never really categorized as one, because I had been drunk. I needed to do this for reasons I didn't even fully understand. 

The reason I say it's a craft issue is because I think it makes it a little less scary. On the page, you can tell when a writer is avoiding something, what they're leaving out. So you need to know why. You need to know what the purpose is. And if you have something to say, you need to be able to say it. If you cannot say it, then you need to rethink what's going on here. 

There was this early piece I tried to write. The man who abused my sister is now no longer part of our family, but he was for many, many, many years. And I was having children. I had this very specific situation: do I go to family events knowing he will be there? No. The answer is always no. But not everybody in my family was supportive of that. So I wanted to write a piece that was like, what is it like to try to raise a child in a family where there is a sexual abuser and you're all being gaslit? Which raises a lot of legal issues. 

I’d sold it to K.J. Dell Antonia at The New York Times, who's a great editor. We worked through several drafts of it, and she was like, in order to make this work, you're going to have to say this. But it didn’t feel right, because it still felt so gaslight-y to my sister. I was like, I can't do it. She goes, I understand. [But] you have to learn how to say this. You will learn. I believe in you. Then we worked on a different piece together.

And what a gift of an editor. You don't always get that. And so I did learn: I wrote around it, I wrote through it. I learned how to do it legally, [with] craft and structure and law. 

With that specific instance, it also created ripple effects through my own life where then if I was demanding this rigorous honesty of my family, then there were some things I needed to think about in my own life. I had a mom blog at the time. As I was trying to work through this stuff and raise children, I remember sitting down to write some post and being like, my marriage sucks. I am unhappy. If I sit down and write this blog post, it feels false. It feels fucking fake. I couldn't do it. And I was like, I gotta find another way to write. Because Wayne Brown's voice was always in my head! You’re afraid to tell the truth, and why are you afraid to tell the truth? Because the truth changes your life. 

JK: I mean, the flip side of that is, and I don’t want to say it’s being too honest, but it’s the unprocessed tidal wave. And I think that often gets talked about as writing about something “too soon,” but timing is not the issue. The problem is perspective. 

LL: It’s process, perspective, and craft. You have to be in control of the words on the page. You have to be aware of what you are saying, what you are not saying. 

I think if people are really confused about this, Maggie Smith's book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, does this really well, because she calls out the empty places. She'll say, I am not writing about this, I am not writing about this. She’ll write around those holes, but she does it in a way that handles it. It's dishonest in the way that it doesn't tell the whole truth, but it's honest in a way where she is showing you on the page the narrative manipulations we all make about our own lives. 

JK: This whole conversation is really making me think of the irony of that Bible verse [John 8:32]: The truth will actually set you free. 

LL: It does. I think that's why women lie about their marriages, because they're not ready to be free from them. 

JK: Freedom is terrifying.

LL: It’s scary.

JK: I think of Thanos in whatever Marvel movie that was. But really, any time some big bad villain who's like, very fascist and very controlling and Nazi-ish or whatever is giving a speech about how people actually like being controlled and they actually like knowing what to do. And they like their prescribed paths and they feel very comfortable and very safe there. And they like the illusion of choice and the illusion of free will. I'm like, oh, yes, yes, all of that is 100% true.

LL: We like a system that benefits us. That's why white supremacy remains powerful. That's why the most liberal white lady will stay married to the most Republican of men because she's like, I'm actually in a situation that benefits me financially. And freedom is scary. 

JK: You’re put in a position of responsibility and accountability for yourself and for your actions, and in a way that actually puts you into then — it’s not actually into a binary, it’s not actually into opposition, but other people perceive you to be in judgment of them, or in a binary of “good versus bad” with them because they're still doing the prescribed thing and you are not. And so you ergo must be judging them for some reason. And that's actually not true. But.

LL: One of the things that I realized broke my marriage was when I kept a list, when I started keeping lists of our fights, what we fought over.

JK: Oh, no.

LL: It was bad. I was miserable. I was like, what's happening? It was one of those things where it's like, it's all me. I had babies. I'm a stressed out mom. Clearly I have rage issues. It's classic. 

I was having an awful year. And because the only way I know how to save my life is through writing, in order to be able to clear headspace to work on God Land, I would make a little list before I did the real writing, and just write about what we fought about that day.

At the end of six months, when I looked back at it, I was like, I can't stay. Because that's how damning the list was. I thought it was just going to be me overreacting about the socks that he would take off and stuff inside the couch cushions. But no. It was far more. But we're so good at gaslighting ourselves. That's why real honesty changes things. Because, like you said, it makes you accountable. It makes you see the story in a way you'd probably rather not see it.

JK: And you're in such a different story now. You're in such a different narrative now.

LL: You can just change! You can just be something else! You can not be sad, stuck, and miserable. I tell my kids this all the time: if you make a choice and you don't like it, you can change again. There's no limit. 

Because it turns out being a human means you're just in the process of being a human. So any human alive doesn't know how to be a human. So you just do whatever you want. Except kill people.

JK: Except that general group of things.

LL: You can tell I have an 11-year-old boy because I always have to be like, okay, literalist. No, you can't reanimate dinosaurs, but maybe give it a shot. But also, famously, that doesn't work out. No, don’t stab people, but, yes, if someone else is stabbing your sister, then maybe you can?  

JK: You’re in the endless Cosmo morality tree. 

LL: Give me a mansplaining 11 year old boy who’s always like what about if? 

JK: Impromptu ethos philosophy class every day.

LL: Let me teach you about the trolley problem. Which could have been a bad parenting move. But it’s fun!

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You can find

lyz

at her fabulous newsletter, Men Yell At Me, which ~also~ has a wonderful Discord community. Pre-order This American Ex-Wife for yourself, your sister, your best friend, everyone.