Marriage Quote by Gloria Swanson

Swanson lands the punchline like a pro: the setup is confession, the payoff is legal realism. "I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages" isn’t just self-deprecation; it’s a controlled demolition of the myth that a woman’s life should be legible through romance. She tilts the spotlight from the private institution that supposedly defines her to the public artifact she can actually shape. Thought, here, is agency.

The second sentence sharpens into something almost industrial: "You can't divorce a book". It’s funny because it’s blunt, but it also smuggles in a hard truth about permanence. Marriages can be annulled, escaped, revised in the court of law and the court of gossip. A memoir is stickier. Once it’s printed, it becomes a portable version of you that other people can keep, quote, weaponize, and misread. Swanson isn’t only bragging that she’s loyal to her work; she’s admitting that authorship is a higher-stakes commitment than love, because it doesn’t come with an exit ramp.

In context, it’s a very old-Hollywood line: a star who survived the studio system, multiple marriages, and shifting fame using performance as self-defense. Memoir becomes her last, most durable role - not the wife, not the muse, but the narrator. The joke doubles as a warning: the book will outlast the men, and it might outlast her, too.