A Refreshing and Mysterious Review of Books about Divorce
by Elizabeth Marquardt

The New Yorker recently ran a critical survey of books on divorce that was at once refreshing and mysterious (April 22/29 issue). Refreshing, because the author Daphne Merkin acknowledged that "divorce is failure" and that children do not want divorce but rather "the old, linear plot line" of their parents' marriage. Yet the survey was mysterious because Merkin, like so many others, steps up to the brink by asking how divorce affects children, looks over the edge and does not like what she sees, and then backs up saying there is simply too little information to know.

The book that fares best in Ms. Merkin's estimation is E. Mavis Hetherington's For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002).  While Merkin is coolly critical of Hetherington's style of presentation she clearly spent a lot of time with the book and she accepts at face value Hetherington's argument that divorce, on the whole, is not so bad for kids. Merkin then goes on to present the "counter" view of Judith Wallerstein, author most recently of The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A Twenty-Five Year Landmark Study (New York: Hyperion, 2000), who argues that divorce has deep and lasting negative effects on children. 

However, although Judith Wallerstein's work has gained wide respect among researchers and lay readers alike, Merkin quickly dismisses it, charging that Wallerstein did not use a control group in her early research and, therefore, her findings are open to question. She overlooks the fact that many researchers, including E. Mavis Hetherington, who have conducted large scale studies using control groups end up with findings that confirm Wallerstein's.  Merkin mentions, but does not explore, what is in fact the most significant piece of data presented in Hetherington's book -- that twenty to twenty-five percent of children of divorce suffer "serious adaptive difficulties" compared to just ten percent from intact families. This finding alone should sufficiently put to rest the question of whether divorce has negative effects for children.  It does, more than doubling their risk of serious, lifelong problems.

Yet, rather than face this conclusion, Merkin decides that social science "cannot guide us toward any deep wisdom about marriage and divorce" and that we must rely on memoirists and essayists instead. True, literature does convey the more textured reality of our lives, but the books Merkin cites each tell the story of divorce only from the divorcing adult's point of view. Despite the fact that children of divorce have their own and very different stories to tell, and the fact that the first generation of young adults to come of age in the divorce revolution has been publishing such stories for several years now, Merkin neglects to mention any of them. One example she could have included is Stephanie Staal's The Love They Lost: Living with the Legacy of Our Parents' Divorce (New York: Delacorte Press, 2000), which is a brave and often painful journalistic account based on the author's experience of childhood divorce and her interviews with more than one hundred other young adults from divorced families.

Most mysteriously, in an essay that grounds its beginning and end with genuine concern over how her own divorce is affecting her daughter, Ms. Merkin oddly opines that divorce has become "a leading cultural indicator, the locus of a whole cluster of anxieties about everything from sex to death," and that children of divorce have become "conscripts" and "ideological proxies" in this game. Ms. Merkin apparently forgets the reason why most divorce researchers engage this question at all, and why so many people buy their books - not because these researchers enjoy making children "ideological proxies" to stand in for their own fears about sex and death, but rather because they are concerned with how a massive social change is affecting millions of real children and young people.

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