I am also divorced from a lawyer, and I could identify with much of what she said about many things. There is something very specifically nasty about an exH who is a lawyer imo. 'I remember how towards the end it felt like a dam giving way by degrees, the loss of courtesy and caution, the breakdown of civility and self-control...' I remember this well, living under the same roof, and he would pass me without breaking stride or looking at me in the dining room, the sitting room, the hall. In the end I did the same to him.
I was the sahp in my marriage, and I think the law is a cruel joke, the kind only an angry and hate filled lawyer could dream up, when it comes smack up against the fact that women make sacrifices to raise families, and yet are expected to jump right back in and get on with making a living when divorce happens. Women lose by being sahps and they lose by being wohps - no matter what they choose they lose. The prestige, no matter what they choose to do, and the financial rewards no matter what they do, are usually men's. I really applaud her decision to write in this way about her exH. Serves him right; bear in mind that he will by all accounts receive part of whatever she earned from writing this piece. Ironic is not the word.
I got really, really good at all sorts of home repair and maintenance, and I would have got a dog instead of Rupert.
I thought the illustration and the photos were pathetic. The prose is a bit purple in patches, and there is too much wallowing, too much lingering appreciation of the exquisite ruins, but a good deal of it rang true.
I regard phrases like 'The feminist scorns that silly complicit creature the housewife' as a confession of hers about what she felt about 'housewives'. 'The feminist' should be read in the context of her ex's taunt ('Call yourself a feminist'). Not an indictment of feminism or of feminists therefore, but a writer's trick of the trade, a rhetorical device.
She discussed her take on feminism earlier:
'She knows that her womanhood is a fraud, manufactured by others for their own convenience; she knows that women are not born but made. So she stays away from it, like the alcoholic stays away from the bottle. So I suppose a feminist wouldn't get married. She wouldn't have a joint bank account or a house in joint names. She might not have children either, girl children whose surname is not their mother's but their father's, so that when she travels abroad with them they have to swear to the man at passport control that she is their mother.
My father advanced male values to us, his daughters. And my mother did the same. What I lived as feminism were in fact the cross-dressing values of my father. So I am not a feminist. I am a self-hating transvestite.'
This imo is a comment well made on the contradictions of life for a feminist, the long way still to go to make an egalitarian world, the basic realities of women's lives coming up against the ideals of feminism on the battleground of divorce when the couple have had children together.