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No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
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About This Book
"Enigmatic, opalescent, so precise." —Jia Tolentino 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.
Reviews
"But she is too often hampered by a frustrating instinct to situate her own experience within the universal."
"Eulogizing a marriage undertaken in this spirit presents a storytelling challenge: it requires inventing the stakes yourself."
"The inspection is rigorous—though not intended to be exhaustive—finding variations in narrative possibilities, subtleties in individual experiences, and imperfections in ideological positionings ..."
"The result is an intimate, astute, and captivating inquiry into the conventions and mysteries of marriage and divorce."
"A nonlinear rebuke to the tidy ordering of the classics ..."
"It is neither chronicle, nor testimony, nor confession; rather, it is a personal and cultural inquiry into the significance of divorce, and by extension marriage, that emphatically rejects resolution ..."
"This raw and reflective account stands out in the crowded field of divorce memoirs."
"While she hints at a number of things that could be said about her relationship and its dissolution, she fails to fully say any of them."
"Firm narratives are precisely what people love to confect and clutch at the end of a marriage, or indeed any relationship ..."
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