Seven novels that will change the way you think about divorce

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor for Medium, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Oprah, Coastal Living, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, and many other publications.

Shearn has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Her new novel is Animal Instinct.

[The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here; Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013); Q&A with Amy Shearn; My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane; The Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane; The Page 69 Test: Animal Instinct; Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2025); My Book, The Movie: Animal Instinct]

At Electric Lit Shearn tagged "seven novels that each made me think about divorce—and life—a little differently." One title on the list:

The Not Wives by Carley Moore

So many of the great divorce novels ask the question, What if divorce isn’t the end, but the beginning? This is the thrust of The Not-Wives, a wild, sexy, queer book about restarting and revolution. Set against the backdrop of Occupy-era NYC, this poetic novel tells the story of three women who are decidedly Not Wives—one bisexual woman who is looking for love and hoping to start a family (while being constantly sexually harassed by men she works with); one young unhoused woman who needs to wrench free of her addict partner; and one queer mother who is still getting her footing after a recent divorce. Liberated sex lives are intertwined with political resistance here; the book opens, “Perhaps fucking was a road map for those of us who no longer believed in directions.” Each of these women is looking for new road maps, paths that don’t necessarily hew to the white-picket-fence-heterosexual-nuclear-family blueprint we’re all meant to desire. As the divorced mother says: “I used to think my job was to stay whole, to keep it all humming along like the vaudeville act with the spinning plates, every plate just about to fall and break, but still miraculously whirling. But I was wrong, my job was to let the plates crash and shatter. My job was to fall apart spectacularly, and then to make a new self out of fragments.”

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue