“The divorced women, those who are young and beautiful like us, illustrate how this freedom for women turned out to be the greatest gift that God gave to men.” This is one of the definitions that Lucia offers about being a “divorcee”, but if you don’t like it, she has others, in fact it has two full pages: “a divorcee, an ex, is a woman who has a torticollis from looking back so much. over your shoulder towards your marriage.”
The divorcee. With this title Ursula Parrott (United States, 1899-1957) achieved phenomenal success in 1929; author of phrases to frame, Parrott should be placed on the altars of lapidary literature at the level of Dorothy Parker or Nora Ephron, however, until in recent years a necessary recovery has begun (Gatopardo publishes it for the first time in Spain). , his work has remained almost unknown to a generation of readers who could benefit from 1. The pleasure of reading it 2. Collecting its quotes 3. The wisdom it gives off.
Because Ursula Parrott was herself divorced (four times) and a fine analyst of what society demanded of an unmarried woman, a category that was then incipient.
“A divorcee is a woman who at parties chatters about the pleasures of being independent when she is sober, and with one drink too many, she launches into talking about the virtues or vileness of the husband who has left her.” We are in the age of jazz and cocktails, of sparkling and liberal Manhattan. So liberal that the couple formed by Patricia and Pete, inspired by Parrott herself and her husband, each maintain their own friends and outings and base their relationship on sincerity, something that works until one of the two, usually the husband, stop believing in it.
When Pete abandons Patricia for a more “pure” woman (the word “slut” will appear several times), a new life begins for her, in the same way as for thousands of women who were beginning to find themselves in the same circumstance. There is a work of (re)construction of the protagonist between restaurants and outings that could not but cause perplexity to those who, as in previous centuries with single women, did not know what to do with women who did not fulfill the role of wives and mothers.
Decades before the concept of sisterhood became popular, Patricia found in Lucia, also an advertiser and with whom she shares a flat, a kind of guide to navigate her new situation. Lucía, another ex-wife with more experience, tries to narrow down the concept of “divorced,” because “not all women who have been married are divorced.” For some, it is much more revealing to know what they do, or if they like to travel, than to know their marital status, but “you are divorced when that circumstance is what most defines you.”
Ex-Wife was first published anonymously due to its scandalous nature, the freedom with which sexual relations are considered – “chastity, in reality, disappeared when contraceptives arrived” -, abortion, and also mistreatment and abuse. Also a lot of bitterness, let’s face it, in the future of the protagonists, capable of putting themselves in the shoes of women abandoned by their husbands after a life dedicated to them, without resources to start over. They were lucky, precisely because they were young, beautiful and educated.
Abandoned by her first husband like her character, Ursula Parrott earned a lot of money with her novels, articles and film scripts – The Divorcee was also a success in its film version, starring Norma Shearer in 1930. Her ex-husband did not even want to meet their son, also like in the novel. After three more husbands and thousands of squandered dollars, cancer very quickly ended the writer’s life. Decades of oblivion followed, for reasons that even her biographer is unable to understand.
Ursula Parrott was surrounded by journalists all her life, however, when she died at age 58, not a single obituary was published. Her ex-husband was, like Peter, a journalist, specifically for The New York Times, something that would explain why the press, corporatist and sexist, was not exactly generous with Parrott, and only spoke about her because of the success she obtained.
When her ex, Lindesay Marc Parrott, died, a brief review did appear in the newspaper where she worked.
Ursula Parrot The Divorced Translation by Patricia Antón Gatopardo 304 pages 21.95 euros
