The Tantrum is not quite a finished book; it is a proposal, overview, outline, and set of sample essays for a confessional memoir-in-essays about identical twinhood, open marriage, female midlife crisis, romantic addiction, motherhood, money, depression, sex, and selfhood. That unfinishedness matters, because the manuscript already reads as if it is trying to pre-defend itself against every possible objection: that it is too privileged, too confessional, too fashionable, too therapy-saturated, too dependent on literary comparisons, too much like other recent books about divorce, open marriage, motherhood, and female breakdown. The problem is that all of those objections remain true even after the book has named them.
The proposal opens with the narrator in a psychiatric ward, having checked herself in after the collapse of her marriage and the disappearance of the man she loves. A nurse confiscates all the dangerous objects in her suitcase: tights, cords, shoelaces, chargers, headphones, floss. Her husband tells her to “get your oxygen mask on” while he holds things together at home. This phrase becomes the book’s central excuse and central problem. The narrator frames her crisis as an emergency, but also as a literary opportunity. She is depressed, abandoned, untethered, ashamed, and furious, yet she is also instantly converting the experience into metaphor: cords mean attachment; cords mean suicide; a psych ward means helplessness; helplessness means rage at being treated as helpless.
The man who has left her is not a great love on the page so much as a fog machine for longing. His final text contains two green hearts, which she keeps trying to interpret as emotional evidence, while her twin sister bluntly tells her it means goodbye. The narrator is forty, separated from her husband after nearly twenty years, financially dependent on him, mother to a young daughter, and newly alone in a way she has spent her entire life avoiding. The psychiatric ward material is sharp in places, but it is also dramatically convenient: breakdown arrives exactly when the book needs a frame for all its themes. The ward becomes less a place than a staging area for thoughts about womanhood, dependence, motherhood, twinship, cliché, medication, and romantic humiliation.
