"This had a lot of the same problems as Lenz's two previous books but now that we're on book #3 I'm frankly out of patience. This is similar to a lot of contemporary nonfiction these days in that it blends memoir with social commentary in an attempt to tie the author's own experience to a larger narrative but it fails badly due in part to the fact that Lenz isn't a strong enough writer to pull it all together and in part because she seems either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge her experience is not the typical 2020s heterosexual marriage. Lenz was the homeschooled daughter of evangelical conservatives and her marriage dynamics could have come straight from the 1950s (at one point she mentions packing her husband lunch's every day for years). As glad as I am Lenz is no longer living a life she clearly felt suffocated by, I was frustrated by how broad a brush she painted with. I wish she had followed a similar vein as other ex-evangelical women who have written heartbreaking and powerful memoirs in recent years detailing how badly the promises of Christian patriarchy fail women (Shannon Harris' 'The Woman They Wanted' is a recent example) because Lenz clearly has important things to say but her attempt to paint marriage as an overwhelming net negative with little room for nuance in chapter after chapter felt very one-note. None of her criticisms of heterosexual marriage feel particularly groundbreaking if you've had any prior engagement with feminist theory, and some of the data she uses to support her arguments feel cherrypicked.
I was also very thrown by this line in a Lenz wrote as part of her book promotion, which is not mentioned in the actual book: "I knew money would be tight when I left. I didn’t have access to our joint account and had to set up a secret account to save money for a lawyer." This is not just a description of an unhappy marriage, this is financial abuse. That word--abuse--is to my recollection never included in This American Ex-Wife . Maybe it should have been."