Customer Reviews

Men on Divorce: The Other Side of the Story (Harvest Book)

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This is a sad book that seems to be written by men to confirm the (female) editor's views of men. I'm a man that's been divorced and have had serious non-marital relationships. I also know many men who have been divorced. None of these essays resonate with our experiences.

If I were cynical, I would suspect that these are professionals writing for a market with preconceived notions, or the editors selected those essays to match their preconceptions.

Jerome A. Schroeder

Following publication of their book "Women on Divorce", which dealt with how bad women feel about divorcing their drunken, lazy, cheating husbands, Kaganoff and Spano attempt to show the man's side of the story in "Men on Divorce". Sure enough, the book is a collection of essays about how bad men feel about being drunken, lazy, cheating husbands. This book is a disservice to myself and millions of other men who have and continue to struggle to maintain the bonds of their marriage and their responsibilities to family. Kaganoff and Spano should be ashamed to perpetuate such one-sided stereotypes.

A mixed bag of essays by men about how they've viewed their divorce, or divorces. Almost all are written many years after the event, allowing some life perspective on the very complex, all too common experience of divorce. I found it very refreshing to read men's largely unheard feelings on this subject.

This is a follow up to the editors first compilation titled "Women on Divorce: A Bedside Companion." Why women's essays about their divorce are a "bedside companion" while men's feelings on the subject are seen as a second thought and "the other side of the story" I found telling of the editors mindset and sadly the prevailing societal notion that women's feelings are valued more than men's.

I noticed that the essays were slanted mostly towards men who led a life of extreme womanizing and numerous relationships after their divorces. This doesn't resonate with my experience of the other divorced men I know.

The editors have put together an interesting read and deserve credit for acknowledging the experience divorce has on men. I could easily have passed on some of the selections, but the following alone I found worth the cost of the book:

- Michael Ventura's "The Ex-Files" speaks eloquently to the specific loss and guilt that is divorce, and on the unresolved feelings we carry around. "Let's not pretend that divorce is anything but failure... Whether it was reckless or silly or inspired (or all of the above), it was still important... You hurt others, you got hurt, and you failed... Of course, failure is not confined to divorce. Many a marriage is a walking failure - people joined in a pact not to know themselves or one another, who try to pull that not-knowing around themselves like a shield against the world."

-Michael Ryan's "How to Get Divorced" absolutely killed me. A completely sarcastic guide book for how to wreck a marriage. Example: "If something about your wife bothers you, speak right up! There's really no good reason why your wife can't be better in every way, if only she would try harder. Scrutinize her aloud on a daily basis." And "Stop Having Fun! This is tricky, because you and your wife probably wouldn't have gotten married in the first place unless you had been having at least a little fun together." But his best advice for ruining your marriage is "When in doubt, be selfish!" It allowed me to totally laugh at my own divorce and my role in messing up the marriage.

-Daniel Asa Rose has a great essay about the love/hate/grief that he has for his ex, and how his promiscuity hides the fact that at heart he's a one woman man.

This book is misleading in that it pretends to show a man's point of view of his experience of divorce. All or most of the authors in this book were carefully selected out by the two NYC feminist editors as men who are left-liberal writers and poets whose points of view pretty much mirror that of trendy feminism.

In each little essay, the man paints himself as the bad guy who made stupid mistakes and treated his woman bad. The wife in most of these little masochistic tales comes off as a virtual angel. Each essay is sort of a self-exploration by a guy disgusted with himself and his choices and how he came to terms with his badness and ultimately realized how wonderful his wife was but how he 'did her wrong'.

Come ON! That is NOT reality in most divorce cases.

The authors do not represent men's point of view at all. Most divorces derive from women simply 'opting out' in order to find her freedom, her expression, and other chic, trendy objectives. In LA alone something like 95% of divorces are initiated by women - and for equally specious 'reasons'.

A REAL 'men's point of view' would have real guys - not a little pile of liberal self-hating 'feminist men' - telling about REAL situations in today's world where there are just as many villains on the women's side and how MEN can be done wrong too.

One must always immediately recognize the impossible and implausible, despite attempts to make things appear ordered and explainable. It is impossible for a woman to author a book on man's private pain and failings. What will make sense to a women on this subject is always tainted by the female bias of "how things ought to be" and an ill-placed, implacable belief that real pain is only experienced by a woman, and all causation is by abusive, drunken men. I can't imagine what they were thinking when they wrote this, but neither can they see into a real man's pain and move beyond streotypes. God!