The Airport of Human Experience

Meghan Racklin interviews Haley Mlotek about her new memoir “No Fault.”

By Meghan RacklinFebruary 22, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

“THERE ARE THREE KINDS of marriage,” writes Haley Mlotek in her debut book, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce:

There is my marriage, which is special: distinct, complex, it defies categorization. There is your marriage, which is evidence: of how, as seen by me, your values have served or failed you. Then there is marriage: the category that presumes an ideal exists at all. But every marriage is turned into stories.

Accordingly, No Fault is told in three parts, one about the history of marriage and divorce, one about the stories we tell each other about divorce (and what those stories say about us), and one about the dissolution of Mlotek’s own marriage—though this is a loose division, as memoir, history, and cultural criticism are threaded throughout the book. Mlotek’s writing is elegant but never icy; the story she tells is one of remarkable romance and grace. The two of us met a few weeks before the release of No Fault in February to talk about glamourous divorcées, “melancholy repetition,” and never-ending endings.

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MEGHAN RACKLIN: You grew up around divorce—your mom was a divorce mediator, your parents divorced, your grandmother was divorced twice over. You write in the book that your grandmother would talk about her husbands, plural, and that you found that plural very glamorous. Where does divorce get that sense of glamour?

HALEY MLOTEK: I think there is some puritanical holdover that makes divorce very sexually alluring because there’s no longer the presumption of virginity. Of course, it’s not like premarital celibacy has ever really been such a widespread practice, but there was still an assumption that certain type of woman was saving herself for marriage. Postdivorce, there’s a kind of freedom from that. There’s this inherent narrative arc: you’ve been through something, you’ve had this huge emotional journey, you’ve come out the other side. You’re free of the shackles that hold other people to social conventions. And all of that is very alluring. It draws you in.

There is also a more political aspect to it. If you were the type of woman whose social status or financial status improved when she got married, that probably holds true after the divorce. Or you might experience a loss of social status and financial gains—but even that has a kind of glamour to it because we love an underdog. Sometimes I feel that the glamour, the romance of divorce is a cover for the lingering, less complimentary social ideas about what it means to be divorced. Because for many people who get divorced, it’s not going to be considered glamorous; it is going to be weaponized politically. I see some parallels with motherhood, in that we get a lot of social cues to really venerate mothers, but we don’t see a lot of social services designed to support them. There is a similar attitude of treating divorced women like a fashion object, or something that has some sort of cultural cachet, as a replacement for actually having structures that support all types of relationships—not just straight ones, not just cis ones, not just between middle-class or wealthy people.

You did so much reading and research for this book. What shaped your approach?

There are a lot of classic novels about divorce that I had never read. I didn’t go to university in a traditional sense, and I had this sense that those books would be unavailable to me. Working on this book was an excuse to read them and think about them. I read, for example, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) and The Custom of the Country (1913), and there were so many sentences in them that were like daggers. I also feel that way about Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872): the depth of feeling and insight and humanity that they bring to their characters had an incredible influence on the way I looked at any other type of research. It helped me to remember that this data I was looking at represented people who are just as rich and complex as the characters in those novels and could not be reduced to the year that they got divorced or the state they lived in when they petitioned for divorce.

I also love Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (1929), which was just reissued in 2023. It’s possible to read it and see just how long people have been convincing themselves that everything they’re going through is completely new. And that is a form of connection—to realize that we’re not in uncharted territory, that we do have precedents and examples, and role models of a sort who have been working this out long before we were here.

My husband recently decided he is going to learn ancient Greek, so he’s been looking at all these ancient documents. He was telling me that there are references to marriage and divorce even in them. It seems like as long as there’s been any sort of concept of marriage, there have been people figuring out ways to end those relationships as well.

Oh my God, absolutely. There are so many places to start when it comes to looking at the history of divorce—it sort of makes sense that you don’t know where to begin, because it’s all about endings. There’s an anecdote that I include in the book: a researcher was interviewing a community of people, and the people said that the current approach to divorce was evidence of a lack of morality in the present day. And then she went back to look at earlier research, and basically every generation had said exactly the same thing. The more things change, you know?

In the book, I talk about research that suggests that the concept of marriage as we see it today comes, more or less from a post–World War II American idea of what it means to have a family or to be a couple. And both political parties in the United States—the neoliberal and the neoconservative—use that concept of the family to push their political agendas in slightly different ways, but ultimately with the same intentions and to the same effect. So, there is such a force of storytelling coming from those parties, and I think that has a huge influence on the way people narrativize their own lives.

What does divorce in real life have to do with the way we narrativize it or depict it?

There is something about divorce that maps very neatly onto what are often considered the conventions of a good story. It has everything that every book on how to write a successful novel or screenplay would tell you to include: it has conflict, it has character arc, it has drama, it’s romantic. It’s like the way an airport is a perfect setting for so many stories because there are so many different types of people there—divorce is kind of like the airport of human experience. At the same time, those conventions often push love stories as something that come with an ending. To have a conventional love story, you have to end the story before it gets too real. Divorce narratives are like the sequel to those stories.

I have examples in the book of people whom I consider to be the architects of both divorce narratives and love stories. Like Nora Ephron, who has this joke: “Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.” I feel like the romance of marriage is that you don’t change your mind—and the romance of divorce is that you can’t. There’s something more formally permanent about divorce. That’s why it’s so funny when people divorce and then remarry the same people. But it still has a formal permanence, even if it doesn’t always have a romantic permanence.

I think Ephron’s joke also speaks to the idea that—no matter what happens to the connections that we build in our lives, even if we stop talking to people, even if we move away from them, even if we sever the legal and social bonds that connected us—we never really get away from anybody. I don’t know anybody who has ever managed to really move somebody out of their heart completely. And I sort of like the idea that there’s never a full severing once we’ve connected with another person; the connection just changes shape. A big part of the book is about questioning what shape divorce can take.

How has the shape of your relationship to being divorced changed?

There was a time when my friends would introduce me to their friends like, “This is Haley. She’s divorced.” It was something people would say about me to explain who I was when I was a very young divorcée. But now I’m a normal age for being a divorcée, so I think it’s less interesting.

It’s also become very tied to my work, and immersing myself in it professionally has given me more distance from it personally. It’s allowed me to see it as an event and a subject. Of course, it’s an experience I had that I have a lot of thoughts about, but now they’re a part of this book. They’re a part of this work that I did. It’s an incredible gift to be able to—not wrap up that phase of my life, because I never will, but to have this physical object that is the culmination of all those years of thinking deeply about it.

At one point, you write that a wedding is “a reminder that even after making what is presumably the biggest commitment of your relationship, everything that follows will still have to feel like a decision to make rather than a choice to live.” I wonder if you can tell me a little bit more about the difference between a “decision to make” and a “choice to live.”

I feel like I’m constantly relitigating the decisions I’ve made, repeating them in my mind and wondering if they were right rather than just living them. I put a lot of pressure on myself to make a choice and then stand by it, and I tend to think of receiving new information that complicates that choice as some sort of failure of the choice—rather than realizing that every day that we’re lucky enough to live and breathe, we’re going to learn new things and figure things out. And because marriage is this presumably lifelong commitment, I think there’s so much pressure on couples not to acknowledge how frequently they consider that choice that they’ve made, or the reality that they don’t have to stay in it if they don’t want to, or that staying in it is not something that you just decide at the altar and then never work at ever again. I’m really moved by the way my friends who’ve been in relationships or marriages go through seasons of their relationship and give each other space to grow and change. But every time that happens, it does come with a reckoning with the original decision to partner together.

Let’s talk a bit more about repetition—you mention Elizabeth Hardwick’s idea of “melancholy repetition,” and you repeat certain things throughout the book, like details about the day of your wedding. What role does repetition play in the story of divorce?

The formal nature of the repetition in the book is definitely a reference to the conventional wisdom around screenplays—the idea that it’s so satisfying to return to an idea or a scene, or even a piece of dialogue in a slightly different format later, because then the audience is like, “I remember that. They’re different now; they’re the same, but different.” I wanted to subtly reference that and also call attention to this idea that there is no linear way forward in our lives, that it is always about overlap and moving back and forth.

After my divorce, I was really struggling with this feeling that there were certain things that existed in my marriage that wouldn’t be right for me to repeat with another partner. And if a new partner was trying to do something with me that they had done with another woman, I would be like, “but this is us.” At that time, I felt that every relationship needed to develop its own lexicon and its own dynamic and that it was wrong to bring in the influence of previous experience. And now I feel very differently. Not that it’s okay to reuse the same pet names for every partner that you have, necessarily—but in the sense that there is no disconnecting yourself and your relationships from who you’ve been in the past. Why would we want to sever ourselves from those memories and those experiences and the things we learned and the things we now know about ourselves and what it means to be close to another person?

How did you think about ending a story that, as you write in the book, is all about endings and never ends? How did you reckon with that in ending your book?

It was very difficult. I spent a long time knowing how that book was going to start, but I had no idea where the book would end up. And then one day—when I was more than halfway through the manuscript—I just knew what I wanted the last sentence to be. And that gave me a direction to work toward. But I could have kept writing forever; I finished, but it’s not really done.

Like divorce.

Exactly.

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Haley Mlotek is a writer, editor, and organizer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Nation, Bookforum, The Paris Review, the Columbia Journalism Review, Vogue, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Hazlitt, and n+1, among others.

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Featured image: Photo of Haley Mlotek by Rebecca Storm.