BookBrowse Reviews No Fault by Haley Mlotek

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In her debut book, Haley Mlotek blends memoir, cultural criticism, and historical information to explore the significance of her marriage and divorce.

"To tell a divorce story, from start to finish, is beyond betrayal. It would be its own form of infidelity," Haley Mlotek writes in her debut book, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce. Fittingly, then, Mlotek tells her own story in fits and starts, out of order, and interspersed between historical research and cultural criticism. She does, of course, talk about her relationship, but carefully, often pulling away before she gets too close. She doesn't want to give too much away, but also this wouldn't be possible: she still can't quite wrap her head around it. There is no story—at least not one clear, straightforward story—to tell. This makes for an often fascinating and insightful book, but also one that is intentionally, sometimes frustratingly opaque and incoherent.

A quick summary of the memoir side of the story, which we learn non-chronologically, is this: She met the man who would become her husband when they were sixteen. They dated almost continuously for twelve years—there were a few breakups early on, mostly because so many people told them not to settle down so young, but they always got back together. Then they married, for visa reasons, and moved to New York. Things almost immediately felt different, perhaps partly due to Mlotek's professional success. They tried an open marriage, a failed experiment; about her desire for other men and a different life, Mlotek writes: "I wanted it so badly but somehow not badly enough to do anything smart or kind for everyone involved and leave my marriage." About a year after their wedding, they separated, and her husband moved out.

Mlotek manages to make the story of her marriage sound unique and romantic, at the same time that it is purposefully vague, skirted around, and pretty classic. "There are three kinds of marriage," she writes. "There is my marriage, which is special: distinct, complex, it defies easy categorization. There is your marriage, which is evidence: of how, as seen by me, your values have served or failed you." The third type is marriage as an idea, as an ideal. Mlotek is just as interested in these second two types as she is in her own. No Fault includes many sections on the history of marriage and divorce—or rather, on the ways marriage and divorce have been thought about and talked about in different periods, and the cultural and legal shifts that have taken place. (Mlotek is engrossing when summarizing historical moments and trends, although she's distractingly imprecise when sharing numbers and statistics—there were multiple sentences about divorce rates I had to read five times before I understood what she was saying.)

Mlotek is sharpest when discussing a specific person or people: her chapter on Audre Lorde, who married a man but "didn't think her marriage was exactly opposed to her relationships with women," is great, as is her chapter on the "excruciating" thirty-hour documentary The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd, about two artists' staged but legally binding wedding, short marriage, and subsequent breakup. She turns, too, to books and cinema, what she calls "divorce content"; I loved her criticism and insights in these sections, such as how she understands the movie Wild ("How it feels to get something right, simply, after getting something wrong, disastrously") and her spot-on description of George Clooney ("charming, desired, and endlessly exasperating ... most comfortable when witnessing someone else's awkwardness"). A chapter on screwball comedies of remarriage seemed like mostly a rehashing of philosopher Stanley Cavell's ideas, but that's fine—I haven't read Cavell and probably won't anytime soon, and I was glad for Mlotek's interpretations.

The last third of No Fault is more personal than the other sections: Mlotek delves deeper into her relationship, her dating life post-divorce, her friendships, her family. To me, this is where the book's incoherence—the way it doesn't quite add up to anything—becomes a little less forgivable. Mostly, I think, because the stories that Mlotek relates are often kind of boring and lacking in verve; they seem to have significance to her, or perhaps charm or humor, but she's unable to write about them in a style that conveys it. For example, she recalls one time that her mother, a divorce counselor, was working with a couple who became so angry "that my mother removed the pencils on the table between them. 'I just thought,' she explained later, 'maybe that could be a weapon.'" There's no surprise or energy to her mother's line—of course that's why she removed the pencils—and in fact the paragraph would be stronger without it, but Mlotek chooses not only to include it but to end a chapter on it. It's odd to me that a writer who crafts insightful, intelligent koans has so little ear for dialogue that sparkles instead of thuds, for scenes that are anything other than quietly serious.

No Fault is the latest in a spate of divorce novels and memoirs in the past few years—including Liars, All Fours, A Life of One's Own, and I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness—and while on paper it seems like it would have similar preoccupations as those books, I think its questions are different. The others are more interested in whether marriage can be rehabilitated, if women can ever be fully free or equal within the institution, and what a woman's life could (and perhaps should) look like instead. In Liars, narrator Jane and author Sarah Manguso come down strongly on the side of marriage being inherently bad for women, and the role of "a wife" being always a subservient one, incompatible with being an artist or an independent person. Hilariously but understandably, Jane blames the institution of marriage and her terrible, cheating husband for her situation instead of taking any personal responsibility. Manguso's book has been criticized for Jane's lack of self-awareness, her righteous victimhood, but that's what I think makes it so good, if flawed. No Fault is the anti-Liars: circumspect instead of righteous, blurry instead of acute, diplomatic where Liars is mean. "Marriage contains. Divorce, then, must be a release ... But if not marriage, or at least long-term committed monogamy, what else?" Mlotek wonders.

But No Fault also tells a different story than these other books because Mlotek doesn't ever really become a "wife," not in the way Manguso means it. She and her husband don't have children, don't own property together; neither seems to rely financially on the other. Two months into their marriage, they get into a fight; we don't know the details, but we know it ends with him angrily telling her, "But you're my wife." "I felt what he meant," Mlotek writes. "He was owed something. I didn't want him to have it." I don't mean to dismiss Mlotek's marriage as, like, "not marriage-y enough," which would be silly, but in many ways it reads to me more like the story of a late-twenties breakup or called-off engagement than the messy, middle-aged divorces of the books above. She realized she didn't want to be a wife—not necessarily because marriage is objectively an anti-feminist trap, a la Manguso, but just because—and she got out. It just so happens that she decided this after she had already gotten married.

So Mlotek's organizing question is something different, something like: In the absence of financial entanglements, children, other external markers of "wifehood," how is divorce different than a mere breakup? What is the significance of that vow if it was able to be broken so simply, the paperwork negated by other paperwork? She admits to a friend that marriage did change her relationship, that something shifted, but she won't say what or how, and it's unclear if even she understands. Having finished this book, I don't know the answer, but that's okay—it's private, and it's not what I was reading for anyway.

This review first ran in the March 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.