Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, detail, 1768, oil on canvas. National Gallery, London, UK.

Vivian Gornick describes the journey to self-possession as one of unimaginable pain and loneliness. “It is the re-creation in women of the experiencing self that is the business of contemporary feminism: the absence of that self is the slave that must be squeezed out drop by drop,” she says, quoting Chekhov, in “Toward a Definition of the Female Sensibility,” from her 1978 collection Essays in Feminism.

The journey, Gornick observes, is “one in which the same inch of emotional ground must be fought for over and over again, alone and without allies, the only soldier in the army, the struggling self. But on the other side lies freedom: self-possession.”

Last July, three years to the month that my marriage ended, I also ended my first serious postdivorce relationship, on the eve of the twelfth anniversary of my mother’s death. It was the first year I had forgotten my mother’s anniversary and one month after my divorce became official. My ex-husband, who had vowed to become a better friend the day we told my father we were splitting up, showed up when others were too fed up with my ramblings and hand-wringing over a man who had made me astoundingly unhappy for months. For some, it was not easy to understand that the sexual content of being loved, after so much loss, was simply gripping.

The sexual vulnerability so specific to postdivorce love is the very thing that rekindles your relationship to experience, but it is also what makes you that much more lonely. The dark months of summer were a time of reassessing: my commitment as a mother, my relationship to close friends, to my sexuality, and to experience itself. I let my body advance my sexual repositioning and reentry in the world. I played simple games with younger men, sexted crudely, and jumped into bed without caring one bit. I wanted the love that came from sexual vulnerability, but wanted it cheap and fast, and even though it felt bad, I preferred to feel anguish in order to maneuver around it.

Sex is never without emotional consequences. The deeper I went into a sexual relationship within my new relationship, the more the relationship drew me away from my writing, which had been, since my divorce, my center. What I gave made me realize I had no emotional self. I had a married self, a mother self, and a sexual self, but I had no “alone” self and thus no creative self.

In her process of rediscovery, Gornick turned to Dorothy Thompson, via Vincent Sheean’s memoir of the pair Dorothy and Red (“Red” being Sinclair Lewis), just as I came to Gornick in mine. In “The Conflict Between Love and Work,” also in “Essays in Feminism,” she inspects their relationship and observes that Thompson, above all else, believed she needed to make herself a “creative marriage.” Painfully, I read Thompson’s testimony, in her 1929 diary entry, of the life she wants. It starts out well: “What I need: more knowledge.” She prizes human relationships, she wants a home, her gifts are interpretive. She’s interested in humanities, politics, literature, economics, and civilized living. And then, a blow: “My passion: creative men.” Gornick chalks it up to the limits of her time. Yet as needy as Thompson pretended she was, observes Gornick, she was an “unstoppable workaholic.” She committed herself to as political a life as Lewis’s was literary, and pretended to be helpless but carried on with life. Ironically, this most unsubmissive of women, the first reporter to get kicked out of Germany in 1934—which catapulted Thompson into fame and gave her a platform from which to publish sharp political analysis—also wrote women’s interest pieces for Ladies Home Journal, a magazine that caters to homemakers of the most traditional kind. Is it midcentury, 1978, or 2013? In the way we mingle work and relationships, our eras seem closely intertwined. These are both the ironies and conflicts of what it means to be a woman, which feminism can merely attempt to define.

If I follow Gornick’s lead, there is an argument to be made that feminism has lost steam because we’ve lost the ability to look at ourselves deeply. For the last decade, women have fought out a public battle in the press over whether they should work or whether they should stay at home with their children. Should they dominate or should they be submissive? We are so busy arguing with one another that we have lost the ability to recognize that perhaps we do things out of need and in time. We have also overlooked what’s far more interesting: our own relationship to power. As mothers, we have tremendous power to shape our children’s intellectual and emotional intelligence and to teach them how to love. And of course as women who work, think, and contribute to our culture, we grow our advantages, though perhaps more slowly. But I wonder: Do we let ourselves feel enough?

The incoherent dredging up Gornick talks about is so dark it is nearly unbearable. For me, it took place in the form of paining my way through, frankly, shame and undone love by writing my way out of loneliness into a place of solitude. Gornick’s words brought me to the stunning recognition that I was completely alone. After the suffering it took to bring me to that realization, the relief was grand, and grounding. I was finally in my feet. That confident groove is a place in which you define your own clarity by digging into a tough, ever-evolving place of long-term findings. Reciting Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” got me through my mother’s funeral twelve years earlier. So I took to the page to transfigure the pain, the only way through it. (“Divinity must live within herself,” Stevens wrote of the life of becoming.) You write, you wait. It was a truth I struggled to tolerate in grad school, in 1993. I wanted to write a certain way immediately, by working my butt off. Robert Pinsky told me that I would get to that place in time. He sighed and told me to do other things: read Ralph Ellison, see some Yiddish theater, wait. Meanwhile, I wrote feverishly, and produced until I got married and had a child.

Most women writers with children fight their inner conflict quietly and slide in a few hours when they can, and make time for what’s possible. But some, like myself, just give it up. Managing a child and a household simply won out. Earlier this summer, I looked at Alix Kates Shulman’s “A Marriage Agreement,” which she published in 1970 in the feminist journal Up From Under. She asked her husband to sign the document that would guarantee her only fifty percent of the labor in raising her children. “They were always there,” Shulman wrote. “I couldn’t read or think. If there was ever a moment to read, I read to them.” Jobs—from homework to gift-making, from transportation to sick care—would be shared fifty-fifty. I marveled. That was 1970. For the first three years of my son’s life, I did virtually everything: I quit my job, nursed, made playdates, read to him for a half hour nightly, then coaxed him slowly to sleep. Over the course of nearly seven years, I had stopped writing, retreated from most friendships, and had become, in retrospect, an embittered zombie, walking through life and parenthood with an unease that seemed uncomfortably counter to the cheer-emoting mothers that wheeled their giant double strollers around the baby-making machine that is Park Slope.

Last year, a friend gave me Rachel Cusk’s gutting Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. She also sent me a link to her essay on Muriel Spark, in which she described the “seething muted trauma” of divorce. She was one of the few women I knew who understood the endless reeling that took place when your family was broken up and, being an expressive person, that you double-suffer not only the social and literal consequences of single parenthood but the emotional toil of working to a place of emotional balance. She took a close look at Spark’s Loitering with Intent, and admired Spark’s ability to “weave stories over an unforgiving life.” And like Spark’s Fleur Talbot, she too “used everyone I came across and everything I read.”

Cusk was difficult to stomach. “To resist pain one must be as strong as pain, must make of oneself a kind of human bomb-shelter,” she says up front. She walks around in a daze, wondering how other couples made it while she and her husband did not. The pages were a teary blur. “Everywhere people are in couples,” she observes, and recalls a family trip to Agamemnon’s tomb in the Peloponnese.