Leah McLaren on marriage (and divorce)
Nine years ago, Leah McLaren appeared on The Next Chapter to talk about her debut novel, The Continuity Girl, a story about a single woman whose biological clock was about to hit midnight. Since that book, Leah has kept busy — she's written columns and articles for outlets including The Globe and Mail and Maclean's, moved to London, got married (twice), had a baby and wrote her second novel: a romantic comedy called A Better Man. The novel wades into the turbulent waters of a troubled marriage between two young people who are affluent, attractive... and really annoyed with each other. Leah McLaren spoke to Shelagh Rogers in Toronto.
ON TRYING TO UNDERSTAND SOMEONE ELSE'S MARRIAGE
It is extraordinary how a marriage becomes its own hermetically sealed world. Even if you have friends who you talk to about your marriage, you're not even conveying a fraction of what's really going on there. There's more than one person in a marriage, so there's more than one truth of what it is at any one time. So even if you get one person's version, you're not getting the other person's version. I wrote A Better Man with a shifting perspective in part because of that, to try to get more of an inside view.
ON THE "FRANKLY INSANE" PRESSURE OF JUGGLING A MARRIAGE, CAREER AND KIDS
When I was in my 20s, I looked at people who seemed to have it all — they were established, they had some influence in their careers, they had houses that they owned, they were married, they had beautiful little children. I remember thinking that that was happiness. That was the holy grail of human experience and when I got there I was going to be happy. It would be like I walked into a painting of my life. But of course you get there and it's not like that. Particularly for women, that time where suddenly you have a spouse, a career, a mortgage and small children all at the same time... it's a very full time, but it's also a very trying time. It's frankly insane. You feel like you don't have enough time to sit down. I wanted to write about that experience and what that does to a marriage, when you're really in the weeds of parenthood, because even if you have help and you have every privilege in the world, there's just so much labour.
Leah McLaren's comments have been edited and condensed.