Why Couldn’t I Stop Telling People About My Divorce?

Some Personal News

TALK THERAPY
“I didn’t want to be an oversharer,” writes Karni, “I was a journalist!”Photos: Getty Images. Collage by Vogue.

During the first summer after my separation, I didn’t mean to tell the people running this country that I was getting divorced— it just kept coming out. I’ve always been a fairly open book. But when my marriage ended abruptly in the summer of 2025, I felt a frantic need to tell everyone what had happened.

Maybe it was a bid for sympathy. Or I was in shock. I wondered if this was my way of putting it out into the world that I was available. Perhaps I was looking for advice. Mostly I felt I had no other way of making clear that I was going through a profound but invisible change in identity.

The ending of my 10-year marriage came at me fast and seemingly from out of nowhere, but nothing like this really happens out of nowhere. I can only explain my side of the street: Just before I got married in 2015, I joined Politico to cover the presidential campaign. We lived in Brooklyn at the time, and the campaign immediately took me on the road for much of the following year.

Then came Trump’s first term, and with it a move to Washington, DC, for my job; then a first baby; a new job at The New York Times; a pandemic; a rescue puppy; a second baby; a new beat covering the maelstrom of Congress; a book deal. I was living in the double-blast zone of the national news cycle and new parenthood, my attention constantly elsewhere. His attention ended up elsewhere too—that is his story to tell.

But for years I had carried a low-grade awareness that our marriage had begun to resemble a series of transactions: trading off who was going out and who was staying in, taking turns living our lives. Mostly I chalked it up to these being particularly demanding years. I told myself any marriage between two young professionals with small children would resemble ours. Sometimes, though, that famous Stanley Tucci line from The Devil Wears Prada rang in my ears: “Let me know when your whole life goes up in smoke. Means it’s time for a promotion.” This kind of peaceful if distant coexistence was just how it sometimes went in a long relationship, I figured.

Nobody in my immediate family was divorced; it just wasn’t something I even considered. So when the marriage abruptly fell apart, beginning with a conversation he initiated as he fed the dog her nightly treats and I thought I was about to go to bed, I felt a mix of shock, relief, and regret.

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That summer, all sensations felt heightened. I listened to so much music. Taylor Swift songs felt profound. I talked on the phone to friends for hours as if I were in high school again. I ate carrot ginger soup and not much else. At night I felt alone, but no more or less alone than I’d been feeling for a long time. Living with the uncertainty about what the future might hold was exciting, overwhelming, an intellectual challenge as well as an emotional one. I had no idea what would come next.

“I am thinking about how happy I am,” I wrote in my journal one day that summer. “Very sad,” just a few days later. “I don’t know who or what I am crying about.”

One thing that did feel good was working. My editor kindly asked me if I needed a break or wanted to slow down. She said she would follow my lead on these matters. I said to pile it on. Which is why, for a few weeks there, I just couldn’t shut up about the fact that I was getting divorced in every corridor of power in Washington.

One Thursday afternoon in July, I sat across the table from Senator Chuck Schumer in a small office at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

That day, he had his campaign hat on, so instead of occupying his ornate office at the Capitol he was stuffed behind a metal desk in a drab room in the Democratic Party headquarters, conducting back-to-back interviews in order to disseminate talking points about winning back the Senate. I tried pushing him for specifics, about the map or the candidates he was trying to recruit in key states, but he would not budge. Schumer is very good at repeating the same thing, over and over, when he doesn’t want to say more.

“What are you doing this summer?” he asked as I gathered up my things to go.

“I’m getting divorced,” I volunteered.

He peered at me over those famous bifocals that are always about to slip off the tip of his nose.

“How old are your kids?” he asked me. My daughter was three and my son was seven.

“Men are so stupid,” he said, shaking his head. “Just so stupid.”

He had not pried for any details, simply drawn a quick conclusion, and I took this reaction like I would take it from a well-meaning distant relative at a family gathering: not particularly revelatory, but a somewhat reassuring conversation nonetheless. Sometimes it just feels good for someone to shake their head on your behalf.

The kids were, in fact, all right. My daughter would have no memories of our family arrangement before the split. My son was mostly just excited to have bunk beds in his dad’s new house. We did not use the word divorce, but my son lived in the world and was searching for it. “What’s it called when you have two houses?” he asked me. “It’s just called having two houses,” I said. When the divorce was finalized many months later, I told him that the big thing in his life had already happened when he started living in two houses and that the official change was just a piece of paper.

A few weeks after my Schumer interview, I was grocery shopping at Whole Foods, picking up the dreaded sunflower butter (the only nut-adjacent spread allowed at school) when Representative Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican, returned a call.

I had written a lot about Mace in the past, but I hadn’t spoken to her in a long time. Aside from tormenting the sole out transgender member of Congress by waging a campaign to bar her from using the women’s bathroom in the Capitol, Mace had been a side player that year.

But she came roaring back as a person of interest when she defied President Trump to force a vote to have the Department of Justice release unredacted Epstein files. She had positioned herself as a defender of women as well as a defender of Trump, and I wanted to hear how she planned to thread this tricky needle.

“How are you?” Mace asked.

“I’m okay, I’m getting divorced,” I said, because, as I mentioned, I couldn’t help myself.

Mace was a 47-year-old divorced mother of two. “Well, you just have to realize you’re going to be alone for a long time,” she said. “You’re just gonna spend a lot of time alone.”

She was right, I was spending longer stretches than I was accustomed to alone.

“But I’m married to the job,” she added.

We moved on, back to our roles in the jobs we were both married to. “I fully support transparency on this issue,” she said of the Epstein files.

I was aware that gleaning life lessons from the likes of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Mace was not a conventional mode of summoning a support system. These were politicians—their primary focus was themselves. (I expect a call for a correction here to say that their focus is on their constituents.) Either way, I was not a constituent, so they really only considered me in relation to what I could do for or to them.

But there was something that compelled me to keep telling them my personal news: It was as if I was trying on my new identity and seeing how it fit with my professional one, making sure that one was still intact.

Still, I didn’t want to be an oversharer. I was a journalist! So a few weeks later, when Steve Bannon returned a call at a low moment, I tried to pull myself together to ask him to weigh in on Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent comments on Gaza, in which she called the crisis a “genocide.” But I was kind of holding back tears—I had gotten very good at crying, viewing it simply as a cleansing bodily function, like sneezing—and we both could tell and that was slightly awkward. So I told him why. He wanted the details. And then he told me to pull it together.

“You’re Annie fucking Karni,” he said. “Come on, girl.”

For all of Bannon’s democracy-​threatening faults—​promoting the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, leading the calls for an unconstitutional third term of Donald Trump, promoting extremism and conspiracy theories of all kinds—​in this particular moment, I think he was just being kind.

We got back to the subject at hand, more comfortable territory for us all. “Marjorie Taylor Greene just reflects her constituency,” he said. “I don’t think she’s an outlier at all.”

The world, it ticked on. Trump’s Medicaid-slashing domestic policy bill was so deeply unpopular
that it could help Democrats win back the Senate. And Trump’s failure to release the Epstein
files was driving a wedge between the president and his base. And Greene’s break with Trump on Israel hinted at a growing foreign policy rift on the right. And I was getting divorced, in case you missed it.

As busy weeks rolled by and I rearranged the house, burned sage, wallpapered my bedroom, took the trash bins out on Sunday nights and wheeled them back in on Monday mornings, the urge to talk to everyone I covered about my divorce began to subside. I went back to conducting interviews without inserting my personal life into the conversation, and that was probably for the best for everyone.

I had now told enough people that I began to notice a pattern. There is a formula for responding to a pregnant woman that doesn’t require much thought. What week are you? How are you feeling? Do you know what you’re having? Oh, boys are the best; oh, girls are the best. Cherish every moment, etc., etc.

Divorce may be almost as common, and marks another massive change. But it’s less clear what you’re supposed to say. I’m sorry? Congratulations? I’ve found that the correct answer is to say both. Maybe people should ask you what week you are, because the emotional landscape does seem to shift on a week-to-week basis in that first trimester of a separation.

About a year later, I found myself interviewing representatives Lauren Boebert and Anna Paulina Luna, two showboat MAGA congresswomen, for a story about sexual harassment on Capitol Hill. I was settling into the shared-custody schedule and my new life, with its new ups and downs, and mostly I was enjoying it. The reality of divorce is that in some ways it means acquiring a second life, and getting to be multiple selves at the same time. You are still the grown-up, parent version of yourself. But you are also returned, at least part-time, to a previous, younger-​feeling solo version that is nice to meet up with again after a long separation. A year in, the out-of-body feeling had subsided. Pop music was seeming less profound. My diet had expanded beyond vats of monochrome vegetable soup. A look back at my journal from this time reports that there was now “more appetite, less feeling like something intense is happening even when nothing
is happening.”

Boebert, for her part, had a hardened view of cheaters on Capitol Hill, which appeared to be informed by her own experience. “My best friend was a little skank and she ruined my marriage,” Boebert said when I asked her about the charge to rid Congress of sexual harassers (many of whom are married men).

That must have been hard, I answered, noting that my marriage had also ended recently. It was just becoming part of who I was, giving me a new way to relate, letting me see layers in others that might have previously gone unnoticed. Life can go sideways for anyone.

“I’m sorry about your marriage,” Luna said to me softly after I turned off the tape recorder. They each offered me a slightly awkward hug, an unusual way to end an interview.

When I saw Bannon later that summer, I admitted to him that his “first name fucking last name” pep talk had been as effective as any I’d received.

He said I looked happier. And he warned me it was still no time to be giving my heart away to anybody new. (Steve Bannon, relationship counselor. The world is full of surprises.)

My summer of sharing was awkward, but it had helped settle me, helped me realize that I was still me, even in transition, and that you get the support you ask for.

When my daughter was born in 2021, I received a letter marking the occasion from Hillary Clinton, whose failed presidential campaign I had covered five years earlier. “I send my best wishes to you for a lifetime of amazing adventures and accomplishments, with those who love you cheering you along the way,” she wrote to my newborn daughter.

Here we were less than four years later, and I jokingly asked my friend who had worked for Clinton for many years whether he could convince her to write me a divorce letter, to mark another new phase of life. I suggested that she could even recycle the same language: “I send my best wishes to you for a lifetime of amazing adventures and accomplishments, with those who love you cheering you along the way.” I would have framed it too.

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