"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion famously wrote at the outset of her 1979 essay collection "The White Album." This was always descriptive, rather than self-congratulating. It's not that our souls are fed by art, but that we need to convince ourselves that our lives are more than random chaos. In order to continue on, in order to give meaning to lives filled with pain and drudgery and confusion, we must edit and construct. We must, as the girlies say, romanticize our lives.

And wives are asked to endure a great deal by romanticizing it. Perhaps that is one reason we are so gripped by their raw confessions.

In two much-discussed recent memoirs, Lindy West and Belle Burden puncture the fairy tales of wifehood that they once bought into, reiterated, and sought to embody. In "Adult Braces," West's followup to her hit memoir "Shrill," she reconsiders the triumphant ending of her earlier book: her marriage. In "Adult Braces," she admits that her marriage was troubled from the start by her husband Aham's insistence that they embrace polyamory, a desire she hoped to dispel by becoming the perfect wife. She learns that Aham (who has since come out as nonbinary and uses he/they pronouns) has secretly acted on their arrangement and has a girlfriend, Roya; as she processes his betrayals, she rents a van and road trips to Florida to find herself. When she returns, she is ready to turn their couple into a throuple. Her vision of a happy marriage has been revised.

But for Burden, the happy marriage disappears into a puff of smoke. After almost two decades of marriage, during which she gave up her legal career to raise their three children, she discovers that her husband is having an affair with a younger woman. Soon after, he walks away from not just Burden, but their children, their home, and their entire life. Left to pick up the wreckage, she spends the memoir sorting through her ideals of marriage, wifehood, and motherhood, trying to understand how she surrendered herself financially and emotionally to a man who could sever himself from her so abruptly.

Both West and Burden find themselves grappling with the crumbling of the stories they told themselves, and reevaluating the wifely roles they sought to embody. They linger over the value that being married to men granted them in the eyes of the world, and the terror of having that taken away; they consider how their anxiety about being a perfect wife (and, in Burden's case, mother) may have made them brittle and exhausted. But we also see what relief they find in being able to sink into having a partner to protect, if not control, them. If there is a cost to pay, well, it's a bargain they were happy to make.

In this episode, we discuss both books (and West's ill-fated rollout, the fevered discourse around the state of her polyamorous marriage, and Aham's furious public response). We delve into their conceptions of ideal wifehood and how they revise them as their marriages founder. We discuss the much-rumored death of millennial feminism, and whether embracing the right ideology can ever really make you happy. And, of course, we discuss how being a Good Wife always, always means doing PR for your husband – and consider whether a divorce memoir is so alluring because the author can finally stop spinning.

Hope you enjoy! xo

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