Chicago author's debut novel luxuriates in Westerns, cowboys and the thrill of divorce

Rowan Beaird first started thinking about divorce while on her bachelorette trip in Las Vegas. The Chicago writer was taking a spin through the famed Neon Museum Las Vegas when a tour guide shared a piece of Nevada history Beaird couldn’t shake: that “everyone comes to Las Vegas to get married and goes to Reno to get divorced,’” Beaird recalls. “I had never heard that in my life.”

So, Beaird pulled up the notes application on her phone and jotted down a thought. It read: divorce ranch? Gold for a young writer.

It turns out that, for a couple decades, Nevada had the most lenient divorce laws in the country, which made it a popular destination for American women stuck in unhappy unions.

“It just felt like this story that had been lost with time,” says Beaird, herself a child of divorced parents. “It felt like a really rich setting for a novel.”

Six years later, the 37-year-old’s debut novel “The Divorcées” brings that world to the page. The slow-burn story follows Lois Gorsky Saunders, an unhappily married Lake Forest woman who flees to one such midcentury ranch — the fictional Golden Yarrow — for six weeks before filing for divorce.

In Beaird’s confident hands, a story that appears relatively slow at first quickly reveals tumult beneath the surface. Released on March 15, “The Divorcées” has received a number of enthusiastic reviews including one in The Washington Post, which notes that Beaird depicts the era with “the mastery of a film director.”

While Lois serves as the protagonist, much of the book’s plot centers on her friendship with the elegant, mysterious Greer Lang. Together, the two form a “Thelma and Louise"-inspired bond that propels them toward trouble.

“I really wanted the book to feel almost like a coming-of-age novel,” Beaird says. “Lois is a character who feels like an outsider and is still very much finding her place in the world.”

The feeling of alienation is familiar to Beaird. Growing up in the North Shore suburb of Northfield, Beaird felt slightly out of step with her surroundings.

“I always felt like I never quite belonged,” Beaird recalls. “I listened to a lot of Elliott Smith, wore a lot of eyeliner and read Sylvia Plath. I neatly checked all the predictable boxes for teenage rebels.”

In high school, Beaird thought she might be a painter. (“I’ve explored all the totally improbable career paths,” she laughs.) But when an art teacher noticed that many of Beaird’s canvases resembled poetry more than visual art, that teacher gently nudged her toward prose. At Kenyon College, Beaird studied creative writing.

In the following years, Beaird won the Ploughshares emerging writer award and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize.

After college, Beaird spent a year teaching in Japan and later returned to Chicago, where she works a day job in the communications department at the School of the Art Institute. Beaird never gave up writing, and after her first idea for a novel fizzled, she returned to the note on her phone.

“The fact that the idea kept churning through my head told me I needed to see what was there,” Beaird says. “I started to research and sketch out the story.”

Films of the 1950s, she says, offered a lens onto the limited lives available to single women at the time. Paintings, by contrast, were a direct line to a female psyche.

“The art of female abstract expressionists was really inspiring,” says Beaird, who points to Helen Frankenthaler and Elaine de Kooning as examples. “These women who were totally left out of that history, but were painting beautiful, furious canvases.”

That interplay of elegance and fury permeates the pages of “The Divorcées.” And while the novel is a piece of historical fiction, Beaird believes that dynamic remains very much alive today.

“As women, we are just not really taught how to express anger,” Beaird reflects. “The 1950s can sometimes feel like the distant past, but I realized that the divorcées’ fears and desires are the same as women have today.”