Taking The Work Out of Foodwork - A Case for The Mommune

As I worked up the courage to leave my marriage, I inhaled an almost embarrassing amount of divorce literature. Even before I was consciously aware of it, I was looking for a roadmap. How are you doing this, exactly? Sure, I wanted to make sense of my own experiences; for proof that I wasn’t the Bad Guy, or that I wasn’t irrevocably damaging my child. But more than that I was scouring the pages for a template, what was this going to look like once I’d put the pieces back together again? 

And while I found something beautiful in almost everything I read, I felt unsatisfied. 

Strangers was a joke. I mean, come on! That man was a walking red flag. DNF.

Splinters was beautiful but politically neutered. 

Anahid Nerssesian articulates the ambivalence of divorce and stumbling towards a co-parenting relationship, but nothing about how to get your shit back together again.

And All Fours was pathbreaking in many ways, which is why it was so disappointing that Miranda July’s protagonist couldn’t imagine a life for herself where she wasn’t really weird about food or her body.

Divorce literature is, by nature, backwards facing. So it’s not altogether surprising that it didn’t offer much more than a slightly self-indulgent catharsis. I’m not the Bad Guy; my kid seems fine, actually.

This is going to sound weird, but the closest thing to a north star came from reading Roald Dahl to my then five-year-old.

Look, I know. We can’t separate art from the artist and I’m not here to try and defend him. But when Willy Wonka said ‘it will be the end of all kitchens and all cooking!’, I felt seen in a way I hadn’t in any divorce literature. Keep talking, I thought. ‘There will be no more shopping to do! No more buying of meat and groceries! There’ll be no knives and forks at mealtimes! No plates! No washing up! No rubbish! No mess!’.