Untying the Knot

Winnie Wang reviews Haley Mlotek’s “No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce.”

By Winnie WangFebruary 18, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

“IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES.” Long before I knew anything real about divorce, I encountered this term—often bracketed by quotation marks—on the Wikipedia pages of famed actors, musicians, writers, athletes, models. I intuited that this was a cause for divorce outside the basis of cruelty or infidelity. But without an underlined hyperlink to steer me, I located its meaning somewhere near “romantic incompatibility,” neighboring the catchall “unforeseeable circumstances.” The pointed use of punctuation by contributors (and the frequency with which celebrity couples seemed to invoke these grounds) telegraphed to me that this type of separation was trivial, even unremarkable. I was, of course, mistaken.

In her new book No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, Haley Mlotek seizes divorce, holding her subject against the light and observing its many surfaces, from all angles. The inspection is rigorous—though not intended to be exhaustive—finding variations in narrative possibilities, subtleties in individual experiences, and imperfections in ideological positionings. To record her observations, Mlotek assembles a collection of brief essays that stretch across genres, spilling out from the neat container of memoir: “I have looked for guidance everywhere but real life. Through fiction and film, through gossip and conversation, through research about the past and speculation about the future, and most of all through work—always work, always writing.” The resulting book, organized into four parts, documents her search for answers and beginnings, moving fluidly between nonfiction modes of literary journalism, cultural criticism, and life writing.

Though Mlotek did not possess authorial ambitions as a child, the end of marriage seems to be inextricable from her formation as a writer, each experience informing her missions and methods of thinking, researching, inquiring. Early on, she recounts a childhood in which divorce was a familial inheritance. Her mother worked as a divorce mediator, eventually recruiting Mlotek to assist with administrative duties in their basement office; her parents later divorced, and her maternal grandmother was twice divorced. After weekly Shabbat dinners, Mlotek wandered around her grandmother’s apartment, admiring the artwork, fixtures, and garments that furnished the home. Beyond its command on her knowledge of divorce, her family life was perhaps also where she developed the sense of curiosity that now distinguishes her as a writer. “I would go through her things and bring objects back to ask her what they were,” she recalls. “What is this? How do you wear this? What does this do?” Her surroundings have since changed, but the questions persist.

Take, for instance, a pair of heavy black shoes that Mlotek wore the day she was married: “The shoes were leather pointed, with a solid platform base that I loved the feeling of almost as much as I loved the look. […] They were special, and they were mine.” Mlotek continued to walk in those shoes after her separation but notes that she later received fewer compliments than she used to. One possible reason she proposes: “Maybe they could sense how much I loved wearing them, that they radiated a feeling of wanting to be noticed for what they meant to me.” The statement weighs heavy with implications, gesturing to further lines of questioning: How do our romantic associations with clothes change over time? And more importantly, do we walk differently when we’re in love?

Divorce was not always a matter of filing paperwork to secure independence. In the 19th century, marriage relations served as the battleground upon which women’s rights and civil rights conflicts were fought, linking matrimony and the possibility of divorce with liberation. When California became the first state to pass no-fault divorce law in 1969—New York was the last, in 2010—couples there no longer had to perjure themselves through the invention of false grounds for divorce. The gap between legislation and real life narrowed. Between these decades were struggles for new understandings of marriage, alternative arrangements such as self-marriage and remarriage, and moral panics over the sanctity of marriage and the popularity of divorce. Much history is collapsed in the first section’s pages; Mlotek is less interested in totality than in articulating an appreciation of “what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power.”

In the second section, also the longest, she gathers an impressive arrangement of heartbreak narratives plucked from her surroundings, noting their forms and variations: “There are the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell our families, the ones we tell while the marriage is intact and the ones we tell after a divorce. The story we keep private and the one we make public are just two examples.” From the public sphere, she draws from marriage counselors, self-help books, wedding speeches, magazine advice columns, and, naturally, films and works of literature. More than obligatory research, this endeavor enables Mlotek to see how others move through the world in marriage and after divorce: “The search for more complex plots in the stories people offer is the search for more ways of being a person.”

With great care and attention, Mlotek dispenses commentary in quick succession, comfortably shifting from vast swathes of history to intimate pockets of popular culture, a skillful oscillation between the macro and micro. She studies every scrap, every scroll—memoirs by Deborah Levy, films starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney, letters between Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick—to find clues about our cultural beliefs. This same spirit of generosity is on display in an essay devoted to the work of Elizabeth Gilbert. Though not quite a reparative reading, Mlotek reminds us of the postdivorce financial circumstances that compelled Gilbert to write Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006), as well as the profound loss embedded in those best-selling pages—a helpful corrective against how we remember the memoir’s fraught legacy.

One essay I keep reading and rereading presents what is to me a list of divorce film recommendations that includes Losing Ground (1982), 20th Century Women (2016), The Brood (1979), and The Squid and the Whale (2005), among others. “Here is Wild, which you have to watch,” Mlotek advises, before a devastating confession:

I get how preparation has nothing to do with avoiding mistakes. How knowledge has nothing to do with experience, but experience has a lot to do with knowledge. […] How there were so many miracles, and so much good luck. How it feels to get something right, simply, after getting something wrong, disastrously.

Of Mlotek’s divorce story, it might be said that there’s a stark absence of specifics such as names, dates, and events, but other varieties of specifics remain perfectly intact. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations abound. “When I tell someone to watch a certain movie I am mostly letting them know something that I am almost ready to say,” she admits. Here, Mlotek sculpts the shape of her experience with fragments and approximations collected from films, revealing familiar outlines and contours without betraying the complete likeness.

Despite Mlotek’s earlier reticence to look at her own life, the book’s third and fourth sections eventually land in the autobiographical mode. Still, she maintains a distance, dipping into various memories along the same stretch of time with no regard for chronology or resolution. “I was divorced on a cold day in the fall,” she begins one essay. A few pages later: “December. Eleven months since my ex-husband had moved out.” Then, a handful more after that: “I remember February of the only year we were married.” I stubbornly attempted to arrange these scenes in sequence like pieces of evidence, as if straightening out the facts would deliver to me a clear narrative, or some objective truth about how to be divorced, but no such revelations were to be found. Mlotek knows, after all, that “there is no narrative that can compare to the recklessness of an ordinary day, of an average life lived.” Her technique is that of fragmentation and tessellation, a patchwork that draws from the archive of media and memory, with infinite configurations and ways to be read.

The description that trails the book’s main title, “A Memoir of Romance and Divorce,” feels appropriate—there’s romance to be found in every corner of Mlotek’s textured and tender account of heartbreak and separation. The dissolution of one marriage, after all, opens the possibility of entering another, a second or third chance at finding love. Specifically, I’m struck by her ethical commitment to her marriage as a writer, the refusal to tell her divorce story from start to finish as a form of fidelity. Whether in uncertainty or pain, there’s something worth protecting, even if the task is composing a 300-page memoir on the subject. By the end, Mlotek knows that she has successfully evaded the most pressing questions we have, but she graciously chooses to answer one: “But what happens after? The answer is that it is still happening.”