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A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
by Haley Mlotek
Book Reviewed by:An intimate and candid account of one of the most romantic and revolutionary of relationships: divorce.
Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her "husbands." As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother's mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire, an ordeal that promised something better on the other side of something bad. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation's inherited understanding of the institution.
Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, No Fault is a deeply felt and radiant account of 21st century divorce—the remarkably common and seemingly singular experience, and what it reveals about our society and our desires for family, love, and friendship. Mlotek asks profound questions about what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power, all while charting a poignant and cathartic journey away from her own marriage towards an unknown future.
Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, No Fault is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.
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. 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...continued
Full Review
(1302 words)
(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).
The title of Haley Mlotek's debut No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce is a reference to "no-fault" divorce, which is a divorce granted without needing to prove wrongdoing by either spouse. For Mlotek, the legalization of no-fault divorce is an important moment in the history of marriage, as it raises questions about the significance of the institution: If a marriage can be dissolved for any reason, does that undermine its personal symbolism and societal purpose? Those generations who grew up after the advent of no-fault divorce, she writes, have a different understanding of marriage than those who could not take it for granted.
Before no-fault, most states required one spouse to provide evidence of the other's marital misconduct,...
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Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of National Book Award finalist All This Could Be Different
No Fault is a remarkable work of nonfiction: sensitive, deftly researched, tender, wise. Mlotek's writing is beautifully alive to the world, alive to the histories of marriage and divorce, alive to the hardest thing to pin down on the page: the truths of who we are and have been, in all their shimmering, quantum states.
