Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf understood that we cannot depict life on the page precisely the way we experience it; she experimented with chronology and language to capture the subjectivity of human existence. Some writers might meet this challenge by rethinking conventional narrative altogether. In her debut memoir, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, Haley Mlotek shows how this central incompatibility yields a useful provocation: There are hazards in relying on stories as the prevailing metaphor for one’s romantic experiences, and even one’s life in total. “The terror of wondering what story my life would be was a perfect distraction from wondering why my life needed to be a story,” she writes in a concluding chapter.
This is all to say that No Fault is not a love story, or even a life story, because it refuses to tell a story in the first place. 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. Compared with other recent works branded as “divorce memoirs,” such as Leslie Jamison’s Splinters and Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, Mlotek’s book reveals few details about her marriage or its dissolution. She seems conscious of the possibility that some readers might be frustrated with her obliqueness, or find her evasive. “Because I don’t tell stories,” she explains, “everyone thinks I have secrets.” Her friends seek reasons for her divorce; she offers none. “As a result, my friends and I are alike in that none of us had any idea why my marriage ended,” she writes, before adding a parenthetical caveat: “We are different in that they think they can find the answer, and I know I never will.”
No Fault’s pointed ambivalence demands that readers recalibrate their expectations for a memoir written by a woman who chose divorce over a man. Those searching for catharsis or an applicable remedy to their own heartaches and existential muddles will find only one definitive answer—that no person can ever fully know her own mind. This, Mlotek claims, is the memoirist’s true work: to articulate the extent to which we are obscure to ourselves.
If No Fault’s ambiguity holds readers at arm’s length, it supplies us with sufficient biographical detail to understand its context. Mlotek is 10 years old when she begins advising her mother, a divorce mediator, to leave her father. Nevertheless, her parents remain in their quarrelsome union until she is 19. In the intervening years, Mlotek works in her mother’s basement office and becomes a peripheral witness to one broken marriage after the next. “I began to think of our home as the place where other families fell apart,” she writes. Eventually, it seems as if Mlotek’s “entire world was divorce.” “All the adults I knew were getting divorced,” she explains, “or should have been.” Perhaps naturally, Mlotek develops some suspicion of marriage, an institution, as she sees it, that sets the terms for millions of lives—imposes its template—only to prove itself an ill-fitting arrangement time and time again.
Nonetheless, Mlotek is in high school when she falls in love with the man she will later marry. As their friends glide in and out of liaisons, Mlotek and her boyfriend build a life together, their commitment mostly steadfast over the course of 12 years. They eventually marry because doing so enables them to relocate from Canada to New York. After one painful, fractious year as husband and wife, they separate and then divorce.
In the disorienting period that follows, Mlotek is not merely a participant in divorce, but also a theorist of it; grief inspires a wide-ranging query into its cultural significance and reverberations. She watches films, both recent and decades-old, that focus on divorced or divorcing women, including An Unmarried Woman and Marriage Story. She interrogates the remarriage plots of films such as The Philadelphia Story and Ticket to Paradise, in which couples divorce and then return to each other. She reads novels about marriages in crisis: Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then. She repeatedly returns to Phyllis Rose’s 1983 critical study, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, which posits a motivation for readers of memoir. “We are desperate for information about how other people live,” Rose writes, “because we want to know how to live ourselves.”
And yet, the cumulative effect of this literary and cultural exploration is anything but prescriptive (whatever the messages of some of the films themselves). On the contrary, these works form a trail of historical and imagined personalities, full of desires and disinclinations that misalign. Most of the people and characters Mlotek encounters are married (or tried to be), and many of them are unhappy in that commitment. In several of these cases, marriage might well be an expression of what the critic Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism,” in which a person desires what stymies them, or as Mlotek puts it, chooses “what hurts.” These readings register not as a collective indictment of conventional marriage—not exactly; instead they illuminate, often queasily, our misplaced confidence in one institution’s capacity to facilitate the happiness of the masses.
Of course, couples have long sought to customize, even revolutionize, the marital bond. Mlotek examines Audre Lorde’s attempt to redefine matrimony and family when she married her friend Edwin Rollins in 1962. Lorde had been living openly as a lesbian, Rollins was a gay man, and they were determined to shape their relationship according to their ideals. The experiment was relatively short-lived (they divorced in 1970). In microcosmic terms, Lorde and Rollins enact what Mlotek describes as the “ambiguity” of the “decisions and relationships and writings” of people who tried to “build something more than what was already familiar.” Their failed attempt might seem to suggest that such endeavors are fruitless. But I suspect that this institution can only truly transform through the persistence of people like Lorde and Rollins, until different ways of being happily married evolve from anomalies to real possibilities.
Divorce, too, has changed over the years. Early in her memoir, Mlotek introduces its titular term, no fault, which refers to a divorce obtained without the designation of blame. California was the first state to legalize no-fault divorce in 1969; New York was the last, in 2010. As Mlotek suggests, the legal designation bestows a crucial liberty upon couples, particularly women: It means that leaving one’s spouse “does not require a reason”—abuse, for example, or infidelity—“beyond choice.” But with freedom can come ambivalence. To end a marriage, a person must weigh competing desires—and determine what they are willing to tolerate, and what they can bear to grieve.
No fault is a provocative term, one that serves as a loose, yet useful, organizing metaphor for a memoir that rigorously resists the clear delineations inherent to apportioned blame. Story plots so often cohere around fault; without it, readers are abandoned to shades of gray. At times I wished the book paid more attention to this term, for Mlotek to more fully consider its potential resonances in the archives she has studied. But perhaps I was simply responding to my own deep-seated predilections, in text and in life, for a logical narrative thread. The title No Fault still sets the tone for Mlotek’s tender exploration into the obscurities of human intimacy. That is enough.
Having admitted my own predispositions, I will lay my cards on the table. I have been guilty of treating love stories as prescriptions, certain that a marriage plot of my own would steady my emotional unruliness. In 2010, this tendency propelled me to marry my college boyfriend; barely two months later, I fell in love with a classmate and realized that I had made a terrible mistake. My own no-fault divorce was finalized in the fall of 2011. Nearly three years later, I married my classmate; our son was born in 2021. I suppose you could call this another love story, but I prefer the formulation Mlotek offers in her conclusion: It’s merely “what happened after” I shifted the course of my life, by acknowledging a feeling I couldn’t ignore and making a different choice.
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