As some of you know I was once married (and quickly divorced) and that union was a hard one for me to get over. I love hard and fall hard, and when I fell, I fell into a mess of depression and cynicism. Some of that cynicism permeated through my fiction and other writing during those immediate years after my marriage.
In my novel, “Darla Went Down” (don’t ask where to get it, it’s not published or finished), the main character has to deal with her boss’ hostility towards her because her boss believes Darla thinks she is better than her simply because she is married. (But doesn’t realize that Darla is in a largely passionless marriage.)
The boss is a black woman, over 40, and never married, but successful. In all the news surrounding successful, unmarried black women I decided I wanted to share the monologue of one angry (but with a few valid points), Ms. Janet Hendrix. Re-reading the monologue is amazing to me because at one point I was as angry as Hendrix after my divorce and obviously, as I wrote this, this was more about my own frustrations than anything else. The whole monologue is essentially post-divorce me yelling at married me for giving up my dreams in exchange for false promises of marital bliss.