Divorce Redux
I loved divorce so much, I had to do it twice
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On January 13, 2026, two days after what would have been my wedding anniversary, I got divorced. Again. Same man. This time in Peruvian court. I had to go through a long, drawn out, bureaucratic process called “exequatur”, which made me wonder if Kafka was actually a Peruvian writer cosplaying as a Prague resident. In short—because I don’t want to make you die of boredom—the Peruvian civil court had to confirm my US divorce papers were valid so I could update my National Identity Card with the correct marital status. It cost me more than my actual divorce, in both time and money. The only reason I even found out I had to go through the process was because my secret, problematic beach club required an updated ID card in order to reinstate me as a “daughter of a member”. I’m sad to say this beach club is the organizing principle behind my Lima life and I wasn’t going to ignore its directives.
When I discovered I needed to redivorce, I worried my ex might have a claim on any inheritance I might receive or any property I might buy in Peru but my lawyer assuaged my fears. The only real effect it had on my life was an inaccurate marital status on my ID card and an annoying conversation with my beach club every year. Plenty of people suggested I just let it go. I couldn’t. The idea of there still being a link to that past version of me, a version I feel compassion for but don’t even fully recognize felt intolerable. I wondered if this hidden governmental connection was the reason all my relationships ended in disaster, why my career was a series of fits and starts, why my own financial stability was frustratingly untenable. Sorry to bring the Harry Potter universe into this, but it was like discovering a personal horcrux that I had to vanquish.
The week leading up to my virtual court appointment, my mom pointed out that there was so much 13 energy surrounding my former marriage. Married in 2013, divorcing again 13 years after the ceremony, on a martes 13, which is Latin America’s version of Friday, the 13th. Since I’m a superstitious nerd, I looked up what numerology had to say about the matter. The number doesn’t symbolize bad luck, but it is associated with power, transformation, and rebirth. How fitting.
I’m making it sound like I’ve had a very difficult life post-divorce, but I want to make it abundantly clear: it’s never crossed my mind that leaving my marriage was a mistake. If you know me personally, or even through my writings, you know I’m the biggest divorce champion and have been since before Lyz Lenz appeared on these Substacks to prompt everyone to get one. My solution to almost any relationship drama is “break up” or “divorce”, and I send out enthusiastic congratulations to anyone who leaves a fucked up relationship.
But I separated at a time when no one was speaking of marital dissolution as the new girlboss move, both in the culture at large or in my social circles. I was in my early 30s and everyone around me was divided into two camps: they were either desperately trying to find their person (shudder, I hate that term) or were in a love-induced fog of domestic bliss with men they swore were the equal partners our grandmas dreamed of. When I was keeping my marriage drama under wraps, I felt like a fool for being the only person on Earth to choose someone so mismatched for me. Once I began sharing that I was in the midst of a divorce, people started confiding in me what they had been hiding behind the veneer of “My Feminist Husband, I Swear.” I felt a strange sense of relief and then a surge of self-esteem. I’ve never thought of myself as brave, but it was surprising to know I had the courage to be true to my desires instead of twisting myself into knots to maintain a mediocre status quo.
In the past five years, bestsellers lists and whatever book coverage still exists has been awash in the Divorce Memoir/Divorce Autofiction boom. Do I even need to list the books? I’m sure all the most notorious titles popped in your head as soon as you read those words. Splinters, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, This American Ex-Wife, Liars, All Fours, No Fault, et al praying at the altar of Rachel Cusk. Approaching them first with genuine curiosity and then outright irritation, I waffled in providing a response. I pitched a counterpoint of sorts to a few outlets. None responded.
By the time I could clearly articulate why I found these cluster of books tiresome, more talented and nimble writers had already published their take downs. I wish I had saved links to these cutting critiques, and I have tried to track most of them down. Alas, they are lost to the crumbling Google SEO-engine, but I’ve retrieved three of the ones that made my skeptical heart sing.
There was Hermione Hoby in Book Forum who astutely wrote, “In 2025, divorce simply does not have the same kind of legibly feminist—and emancipatory—thrust it had decades ago. It may wish to look like Nicole Kidman exiting the attorney’s office; but it can’t feel like such a release for the simple reason that marriage doesn’t represent the same oppression it once did.” My divorce felt like a personal sigh of relief but I never considered the process, in and of itself, as a political act that reverberated beyond my own personal trauma. I don’t know, didn’t we all grow up with a bunch of friends whose parents were divorced? Didn’t we at least have a couple of divorced aunts or uncles? Divorced parents? As painful as it may be, I always thought of divorce as mundane. Quotidian.
Anahid Nernessian in The Yale Review also pointed out the limitations of the Royal We that so much of this Divorce Content™ takes for granted: “I could not empathize with a fear many of them expressed, that if a woman is not a wife she becomes invisible; that the absence of a legible role makes her disappear from the social register.” Whatever I thought marriage would do for me, status was never it. There is nothing more normcore than being a wife. In my head, it was a neutral category. I interpreted the United States pressure to become one as a vestige of some backwards, Christian-tinged, dare I say, agrarian society that simply did not jive with my understanding of what career-oriented women who lived and published in Manhattan would care about. So all of this mourning for a privileged position that swims between the lines of many of these books sounds infantile, like a grown ass woman being pressured into buying jeans because all the cool kids are doing it.
Which perhaps leads me to my favorite essay on the topic, published in Deez Links in their series Hate Read. Using the pen name Laura Limpus, they state sin pelos en la lengua: “By and large, it’s an army of unrelatable, privileged white ladies who make a livable wage as writers. The premise of their books is how appalled they are that they could be so let down by a relationship.” I suspect many of publishing industry’s unrelatable privileged white ladies, from publicists to editors, emerged from COVID battling their own marital strife and dove into the trend with the zeal of a college sorority’s group chat. Which is fine! Ish! But I’m still wondering if the reason we don’t see many divorce memoirs from Black or Latine authors isn’t because they don’t exist, but because it’s not surprising to THEM that we would be let down by the men in our lives, what with their (supposedly) lack of father figures and machismo running rampant and our own internalized self-hate. Or something. But the good white guys who voted for Hillary and have a degree from Oberlin? They were supposed to be better.
Thankfully, I’ve never lived under the delusion that any of my love stories were above the patriarchy.
But perhaps what was most alienating of the vast majority of these stories was the cushyness of it all. How I wished my big marital issues were existential boredom or a predictable affair. How I wished the tension was based on me focusing too much on my professional success. How I wished I got to fight over property and then decompress on a Greek Island. Instead, I divorced with no success, no money, and barely any friends to my name, away from my family, and in a city that I barely knew. Granted, I had nothing to lose so maybe that made it easier to walk away, though I carried with me the heavy baggage of thinking I had failed at every adult endeavor I had tried. At the time, I had recently left my PhD program too and both events are inextricably linked in my memory. Honestly, the collapse of my career path weighed just as badly, if not more, than that of my marriage.
If there was anything I related to in the many divorce books I read, it was the feeling of being trapped underwater, as if an undercurrent had pulled me under and was dragging me further and further away from shore. It’s tempting to describe yourself as a passive agent in an ever-worsening situation, but keeping your mouth shut or trying to mold yourself for someone else is a decision one makes. I put too much faith in my ability to adapt to everything without truly questioning if I should, a little too late. When it came to articulating what I wanted for my adult life, I was a late bloomer and I have not one else but me to blame. The only way I could get to that level of self-awareness was by lighting a blaze and turning everything to ash, a method I’ve repeated often since (and, one could surmise, was formed after a lifetime of moving but I’ll let my former therapist mull on that one). Like a ritual burning, I don’t know how else to control or renew my environment unless I set things on fire. That’s not the patriarchy or even my ex. It’s me.
I often say that my dysfunctional marriage and eventual divorce wasn’t the biggest heartbreak inflicted on me by a man, but it was definitely the biggest heartbreak I ever inflicted upon myself.
The ins and outs of my divorce rarely appear in my writing. I used it as inspiration for an article on shared pet custody a few years ago. I busted out a banger of an essay about the time I was interrogated by the FBI which, yes, is related to my divorce and which I only share in live readings because I am still terrified of the repercussions of putting that experience in print. (Yo, AWP offsite readings, call me! You won’t regret it.) But I don’t really write about it because contempt, whether projecting it or being on the receiving end of it, is a tedious and repetitive affair. Just look at this season of Summer House. Don’t laugh!!! I WILL bring Bravo into this!!! We’re only two episodes in and Kyle and Amanda’s constant snipes keep transforming promising scenes into a depressing humdrum. Compare that with the simmering yearning and regret between Wes and Ciara. Conflict is interesting because underlying it is something worth fighting for. By the time you’re headed for divorce though, you no longer have tension. It’s just a slow, painful, gray, monotonous march into the inevitable.
In other words, I don’t write about my marriage or my divorce because I truly believe everything that happened after it was so much more interesting, entertaining, life-affirming, colorful, vivacious, dynamic and captivating. It’s where I built my career, fostered a stage presence, nurtured a creative community, deepened the relationship with myself, fell in love and lust multiple times, embraced whatever iconoclastic energy I had, and owned my desires. Marriage didn’t make me feel grown up, I fumbled through it as if I was playing house in a costume three sizes too small. But divorce catapulted me into adulthood, with no return ticket. If I was ever to write a divorce memoir, it would begin with me moving into my 2-bedroom apartment in Avondale, the only place that ever felt like my own personal kingdom, and I’d rarely bring up anything from my past. That’s where this Ines Bellina was born.
In my lawyer’s office, on that Tuesday, we both sat down in front of his laptop. He clicked on a Zoom link. Three Peruvian civil court judges appeared on screen. A legal aid read a very long preamble stating my case number, the reason why I had to appear in court and a list of the documents before them. When she finished, the head judge asked the others, “¿Conforme?”. They answered a hurried, “Sí” and logged out so quickly, I thought we had lost the connection. But nope, that was it. Like a spell. One word and I was free, free for good.
“The idea of there still being a link to that past version of me, a version I feel compassion for but don’t even fully recognize felt intolerable.” I feel that.
Just finished reading Heartburn and I am dying to chat with someone about it. Love you, friend! This is a beautiful piece.