Notes on a scandal: Monica Heisey on why Ursula Parrott’s account of divorce is still alarmingly relatable

Nearly a century after it was first published, Ex‑Wife remains relevant and scathing, writes the Really Good, Actually author

Late in the novel Ex-Wife, a pair of newlyweds turned sudden divorcees gather for a final dinner. Peter and Patricia are both somewhat battle-worn: after their lopsided open marriage came to drunken blows, Peter took up with a series of other women and moved out, while Patricia refused to formally divorce him. Unkind words were exchanged, and each had a habit of drunk dialling the other and suggesting doomed lunches or even more doomed sex. Someone was thrown through a glass door. Now, things are calmer. After a few wistful remarks and rather more Tom Collinses than is prudent, it’s time for Peter to call his former wife a taxi. As he leaves the room he pleads: “For God’s sake, think of something flippant for your parting speech, darling. I have thought of mine.” When he returns, both their efforts falter (having the last word is not always the pleasure it’s made out to be). But perhaps this is inevitable: how to sum up the end of a marriage?

One of the many successes of the book is that it doesn’t really try. Patricia, its narrator, equivocates and changes her mind, doubts herself and tells different versions of her partnership and its ending to different audiences for different reasons. The result is a moving, funny and at times disquieting portrait of a woman shocked by the end of something she thought would last for ever. Reading Ex-Wife as one myself, I was struck by our similarity of experience, despite the nearly 100 years separating Patricia’s divorce and mine. Here were the familiar flailing efforts at self-improvement, the disastrous dates repackaged as fun anecdotes for friends with fiances, the expensive facials one cannot really afford, the histrionic tirades about how Love is Irrevocably Broken. Among the alarmingly relatable humiliations and miseries, there were familiar triumphs, too: a near-manic night on the town with a fellow single friend, a perfectly timed comeback in an imagined argument, a flicker of self-belief on the walk home, those early flirtations that gesture at the possibility that another human being might one day desire and even love you.