If you hold the status of an available, heterosexual millennial woman in 2024, you are probably an Ex-Wife. Claire Marie Healy writes about the brutal relatability of reading Ursula Parrott’s 1920s novel one hundred years later.
In the second season of Sex and the City, before the show has really figured out its thesis, there is a revealing moment couched inside one of the show’s usual comic beats of rejection from a man. Miranda, our go-getting career woman, has redecorated her entire apartment for a visiting Londoner because she thinks he sounds attractive over email. He falls in love with her interior decorator at first sight. On my first watch, such a plot point registered as typical – just another dating disappointment. More recently, I couldn’t help but mark the difference between the women: Miranda, with the cynical shell that is her signature, and this other woman, who ‘gets the guy’, irresistibly lovely in her openness.
It brings to mind the original downfall of Patricia, fellow Manhattanite and the stylish protagonist of Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife (first published in 1929 and reissued this year), who invites a ‘placid and amiable and well-mannered’ woman into her home only for her husband to fall in love with all those ways in which this new woman is different. To follow Patricia’s story, growing intimate with her working life (as a fashion copywriter), nights out and various romantic and sexual encounters as a 24-year-old woman whose husband has suddenly left her, is to experience many such parallels with modern single-womanhood – and to understand how, and how easily, a self-protective armour such as hers and Miranda’s begins to form.
‘The fact of it is, if you hold the status of an available, heterosexual millennial woman in 2024, you are probably an Ex-Wife.’
In fact, that Ex-Wife is set in 1924 does little to render it any less relevant to the experience of dating above a certain age in the city today, especially in its early sections. Dressing ‘with extreme care’, typing all day, rent to pay, nights that exist to be ‘filled’ and ‘weeks that [slip] past as swiftly paced as moods’: the fact of it is, if you hold the status of an available, heterosexual millennial woman in 2024, you are probably an Ex-Wife.
‘We are free’, says divorcée Lucia in her attempt to define Ex-Wife-ness. (She is Patricia’s elder flatmate and single-life sister-in-arms.) ‘Free to pay our own rent, and buy our own clothes, and put up with the eccentricities of three to eight men.’ If the latter numeration sounds like a lot to manage – and it was such statements that sounded moral panic alarms in the time of the book’s own release – these days it resembles an inbox on any online dating app, where the men often outnumber the women. (Funny, for a technology so new and impactful over our lives, that the commonly-agreed shorthand is OLD).
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I’ve always loved female protagonists of the inter-war years: their presence in literature, from Elizabeth Bowen to Virginia Woolf, chronicles a period in which young women were moving around more than ever, picking up new independences at speed.
Patricia has something of Julia in Brideshead Revisited about her in her aforementioned hard shell: the Evelyn Waugh character is difficult to hook into because she is neither protagonist nor, as a woman, the driving love interest.
Although the life of Patricia’s author, Ursula Parrott, is unmistakably present in her protagonist – the at-first-anonymous debut was inspired by the struggles of Parrott’s own 1926 divorce from journalist Lindesay Marc Parrott – we might wonder at the stark remoteness of the character, whose story is after all told in the first person. It’s not that Parrott’s rendering of Patricia doesn’t allow us to connect with Patricia’s emotions – in fact, we do feel everything with her. But rather, among encounters with men that vary wildly from precarious joy to insults and actual danger, we recognise all too well the necessity of Patricia’s strategies of indifference.
‘I’ve sometimes wondered if, having consumed so many movies and books about relationships well before I found myself in one, it’s created a gestural playbook I can’t help but subconsciously emulate.’
There is a necessary hardness about Patricia that is also the hardness of style.
She is ‘cold and dry, like a Martini’; she is ‘grateful for [her] looks’. Parrott’s prose acts on the surface in other ways too, as we learn of Patricia undergoing experiences as extreme as an abortion and domestic assault with descriptive language that suggests the character is also watching herself experience such pain, as though from the outside. When her husband, Peter, leaves her, Patricia says, ‘I hoped I looked devastated; I hoped I looked lovely.’ Or here, in jolting third person: ‘Ex-wife – ex-wife of Peter puts on a beaver coat and fresh white gloves. I cannot bear being ex-wife of Peter.’ Parrott’s ability to capture these out-of-body experiences during acute emotional distress is astute.
For myself, I’ve sometimes wondered if, having consumed so many movies and books about relationships well before I found myself in one, it’s created a gestural playbook I can’t help but subconsciously emulate (when my boyfriend of some three years came to my shitty apartment to break up with me at random one day in my twenties, I famously threw objects at his head like a soap actress). Such dissociations feel familiar: I understand Parrott, and her Patricia, when she writes that, sometimes, only the clothes ‘feel real.’
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‘There is a sense of embattlement that doesn’t seem particularly conducive to love. Everyone is holding their cards close to their chest, trying to play before they get outplayed,’ writes Miriam Gordis in a recent essay for Dirt.
She is talking about the current app-shaped state of romantic love, but she could be talking about the scenario in which the characters find themselves in Ex-Wife. Gordis also touches here on the current atmosphere of unsolicited advice for women who are ‘daring’ to date, an endless circulation of Reels and TikToks in which one is given options such as trusting no one, dating multiple people at once or just becoming celibate and not bothering (there is a secondary character in Ex-Wife who has done just that, a possibly lesbian-coded artist who has decided that to avoid men altogether is best). Just like the world Patricia finds herself in, the world we find ourselves in is not made for romantic natures. It is this realisation that prompts Patricia towards her key tenet: that the only survivable method is to simply ‘be harder, inside’.
But Parrott’s real genius may lie in what she understands about the men of her world. Embedded within this tale of Patricia finding herself, we also, from her protagonist’s perspective, get Parrott’s measure of the male population of her time: men who either have missed the Great War or are deeply scarred by it (we also hear about former loves lost forever to it). As Heather Havrilesky wrote in a recent Ask Polly advice column that I have read multiple times this year, there is an unmistakable lostness to a generation of young men today, too. ‘Covid provided the blunt trauma that put a previously swaggery, possibly porn-addicted (or porn-supplemented, lol) single man in touch with his ongoing need for real emotional closeness, while instilling a new fear of dying alone’, Havrilesky writes. In Parrott’s experience as in our own, we get the overriding sense that men of this generation are not okay; hers is an authorial gaze on men that is often sympathetic, but always high-definition when it comes to their failings.
There is a lot of fun to be had in Ex-Wife, but it is a story that asks questions of the fun it is having. By operating at the harsh edges of its era, it cracks open any preconceptions of jazz-age excess as pure freedom. By doing so, Parrott plunges us into a certain unease of excess that can speak directly to our own time. ‘That’s the thing about the Roaring Twenties’, the podcaster Caroline O’Donoghue (Sentimental Garbage) recently said of our own present day of Feeld promiscuity and smoking cigarettes. ‘The shitty thirties were looming.’
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Someone told me recently that in order to make things easier for myself, I ought to accept today’s dating culture for what it is and not wish it were otherwise.
The problem, my friend said, is that they don’t feel they owe you anything. Like a cathartic conversation with a recently broken-up-with woman in a pub bathroom, this reissue of Ex-Wife comes recommended for anyone navigating this current scenario, offering a reading experience at times ecstatic in its relatability. ‘Applesauce!’ Patricia exclaims to herself as she undergoes one of her final emotional divestments from her ex-husband (I never really understood what this meant, but I take it to be a rousing terminology of its time, like being brat). ‘Live alone and die alone, like as not. And nonchalantly, too. He taught me to be nonchalant. I may be grateful someday.’
Ex-Wife is of course relatable in its surface pleasures – Patricia’s job, socialising, love of clothes – but its more brutal relatability is all too present in this line. That is, in order for all this to be survivable, the smart woman must become emotionless: hollowed out. You have to take everything casually. They don’t feel they owe you anything. I’m not quite there yet. But it’s still a comfort to know that a century ago women sat across a table from some friend or other, telling them the exact same thing.
Claire Marie Healy’s writing and curated projects explore film, art, fashion, and the internet. A Contributing Editor for AnOther, her writing has appeared in the Guardian, Dirt, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Review and others. Her ongoing research project, Girlhood Studies, explores how visual culture shapes the experiences of young women, and has encompassed a column, film screenings and an essay-book with the Tate.
Buy the Book
‘A forgotten classic: darkly funny and startlingly contemporary, full of witty one-liners and stop-you-in-your-tracks observations about romance, work, and life.’ (Monica Heisey, Really Good, Actually).
Book and Cap
Ursula Parrott’s forgotten classic Ex-Wife (paperback) together with a bottle green baseball cap. Exclusive to Faber. RRP value: £27.99.