Literary Vice

You might be forgiven for thinking it a tad masochistic to read Awake: A Memoir which is, among other things, about the journey through divorce, at a time when I am doing the same. But! Hear me out. This is a very bad book, and there’s nothing misery loves more than silently judging something for being terrible (or in this case, publicly judging).

Jen Hatmaker writes Awake in the years after she awakes in the middle of the night to hear her then-husband on the phone with his mistress. Hatmaker had been married for twenty odd years, having wed young because of God and Christianity and Etc. In what follows we get short chapters that may or may not have been written with the intention of having them transcribed in cursive script onto a poster to hang – motivationally – on a kitchen wall. Live, laugh, love etc. We are, I think, to believe that Hatmaker’s journey from puddle of emotional ruin to self-actualized independence is one we can all travel are we simply to Focus and Let The Light Shine.

Alas, what Hatmaker spends zero attention on (at all) is the gross privilege she swims in. Oh sure, there’s a chapter where she is aghast to discover she doesn’t know a single thing about her finances or how they work, but there’s never a moment where financial insecurity poses a real threat. Implicit is the knowledge that this is a rich, white woman for whom things like the hydro bill have never properly kept her up at night. This financial security and abundance has the effect of affording (literally) Hatmaker and her children opportunities for ‘self exploration’ and ‘healing’ that include a month of (I kid you not) ‘me camp’ where Hatmaker can simply follow her bliss and #discover herself.

It would be one thing if this privilege were acknowledged and recognized as a security net for self-discovery and confidence that most divorcing women/people do not have access to, but alas, Hatmaker cheerfully narrates the memoir as if the abundance of hoteling and patio remodelling is a given.

Where I do credit her, and what I know I am learning on my own #journey (irony intended), is the incredible strength of community and the friendships that will find you when you need them most. I have been – am – overwhelmed by the care of a network of people (a constellation if you can imagine them all working in tandem to make something for me) who have surfaced – some after years of my neglected communication – to hold me, R and L up. And in this Hatmaker is right: you can pretend that you can survive something as uprooting as divorce alone, or you can submit to the humility of asking for and accepting help. And neither path is easy (how I have bristled at the realization that I alone cannot unstick my outdoor faucet or hang my own TV) but one path opens to more love.

I guess Hatmaker is also something of a Christian celebrity, and I do not envy her the microscope of judgement that must have accompanied her divorce. So while her memoir is kind of gross, I admire her willingness to write her journey publicly and to remind each this reader that shame has no place in this experience – we are all, in the end, just doing our best. Some of us happen to be doing it with enough money to spend a week in a villa.