First came the marriage plot; then came the commercial divorce memoir, an epiphanic form relishing little pleasures and self-discovery afforded by international travel.
Both genres were new once. Now, they each have their practitioners, who might uphold their original conventions, cant them somehow, or add on a self-aware, metafictional layer. More than enough moving novels emerge from experiments in applying these forms to contemporary life. But there must be a story structure more fitting to how we love, date, and split up these days, when divorce is no longer a cause for denying a bank loan and marriage is less compulsory than ever. Right?
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