Haley Mlotek’s “No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce,” Reviewed

Last summer, a poll by the Survey Center on American Life produced a striking statistic. Breaking down the electorate by marital status and then by gender, the survey found that, in an already polarized Presidential race, one divide stretched wider than the others: divorced men were fourteen percentage points more likely than divorced women to say that they supported Donald Trump. (Indeed, in this breakdown, divorced men were more likely than any other segment of the population to support Trump.) The finding resonated with Gallup research showing that the partisan divide between divorced men and divorced women was higher in recent years than it had been in two decades, with men skewing Republican. Marriage is well established as a predictor of political behavior—divorce, these figures suggested, could be a similarly profound and potentially radicalizing event, one with the power to alter its participants’ lives and their fundamental understanding of the world.

Haley Mlotek, a Canadian writer, ended a marriage in her late twenties. In her new book, “No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce,” Mlotek writes that her experience “hadn’t defined my feelings, but it had changed the shape of them in a way I couldn’t have predicted and probably would never recover from.” As that language indicates, her treatment of divorce is measured, a bit opaque, and resolutely abstract—far afield from the battle of the sexes that characterized last year’s election. Mlotek, now in her late thirties, came of age in an era of widely available and culturally normalized divorce. Her mother worked as a divorce mediator from an office in the family basement; her grandmother, twice divorced, would start stories with “my husbands,” a plural that struck the young Mlotek as glamorous. Mlotek’s parents separated when she was nineteen—but, long before that, she writes, “my entire world was divorce.” She grew up overhearing her parents fight about money and sensing the strain in their relationship. When she was ten, according to family lore, she proposed that her mother get a divorce. “Being able to end a marriage was a fact as obvious as all the other luxuries I was lucky enough to take for granted, like breakfast every morning and being left alone to read for as long as I wanted,” she writes.

Mlotek’s divorce came at the end of a thirteen-year relationship: she and her husband met as sixteen-year-olds and stayed together, an early and enduring commitment that marked them as outliers among their peers. “We knew something they didn’t,” Mlotek writes, of the clarity they shared and the identity it gave them. “We were each other’s home. We were together forever.” They didn’t plan to marry but did so for visa reasons when Mlotek took a job in New York. One year later, they agreed to separate.

Their divorce, which is the book’s spine, involved no children to worry about, no joint finances to unravel, no rigid domestic roles to reinvent. There were no debts; there weren’t even any pets. “We had our years and nothing else,” Mlotek writes. She and her husband faced no pressure to wed and no censure when they parted. The whole experience took place under circumstances so neatly constrained as to resemble a thought experiment.

Stripping divorce of practical and social baggage means that the focus of “No Fault” is internal by necessity: the book explores the end of a marriage primarily in terms of how it might change its central players’ feelings. Mlotek is, by her own admission, wary of discussing her feelings, and inclined to address painful episodes in her marriage with scrupulously evenhanded poise and diplomacy—as is her birthright, being the child of a divorce mediator. But, as the divorce gap implies, feelings among the divorced are not always so easily managed.

“No Fault” joins a number of recent books by women that take up the dissatisfactions of heterosexual matrimony, including “Splinters,” by Leslie Jamison, and “Liars,” by Sarah Manguso. (Still other authors, in a mini-genre adjacent to these divorce stories, have described adventures in open marriage and polyamory.) Mlotek is not even the only Canadian woman this year to publish a book centered on a brief marriage that dissolves after a move to New York—there’s also “Sucker Punch,” a collection of autobiographical essays by the writer Scaachi Koul. As the novelist and critic Hermione Hoby points out, in an essay on the “remarkable proliferation of contemporary divorce narratives,” these books, on the whole, present divorce as liberation and marriage as oppressive, a tendency that Hoby regards with exasperation. “In 2025, divorce simply does not have the same kind of legibly feminist—and emancipatory—thrust it had decades ago,” she writes.

Mlotek’s book stands out for its avoidance of such clear-cut binaries; her analysis is defined instead by an insistence on ambiguity. “I was married and now I’m not, and when I consider either state I worry it seems more like trying to describe a dream I never had,” she writes, in one representative passage. Uncertainty, in her telling, is a matter of principle. Marriage is unknowable, divorce ineffable, her own opinions and experiences elusive. “In a novel, a writer must prove to us they know what everyone is thinking,” she writes, in a section on the novelist Deborah Levy’s account of life after divorce. “In a memoir, a writer must admit they barely know what they’re thinking, let alone anyone else’s thoughts.”

Alongside Mlotek’s personal narrative, “No Fault” offers a social history of divorce and meditations on the cultural detritus she turned to while grappling with her separation—from Nora Ephron’s “Heartburn” to a 2001 paparazzi photo of Nicole Kidman to Joan Didion’s “The White Album.” “We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce,” Didion wrote, in a 1969 passage that Mlotek quotes. “I became very jealous whenever I remembered a sentence Joan Didion wrote for the column she used to publish in Life magazine,” she writes. “How elegant, to leave it at that. How maddening.”

Another divorce memoir, “This American Ex-Wife,” by the journalist Lyz Lenz, approaches the same material in a more pragmatic spirit: “I once read in an article that Joan Didion and John Dunne had once considered splitting up but had gone to Hawaii instead. In therapy, I asked to go to Florida. We needed time together. We needed time away. Maybe the Didion solution was the answer.” Lenz’s husband tells her that vacations are too expensive. Their therapist suggests doing a jigsaw puzzle together. Contra Mlotek, Lenz is pretty clear on what she’s thinking, and willing to hazard that she knows a thing or two about what the reader is thinking as well. “I’m not arguing that you personally should get a divorce. I mean, not necessarily,” she writes. “This book is not gentle divorce apologetics but a full-throated argument in favor of it.”

Where Mlotek relates her story with grave wistfulness, Lenz is angry, exuberant, and polemical. She grew up evangelical and homeschooled, ensconced in nineties purity culture, and she comes to divorce with the zeal of a convert. (“Lenz chose to marry a conservative Christian homophobe who refused to cook or clean and was bad in bed,” Hoby writes, which seems a touch ungenerous.) Her upbringing held marriage as a holy commitment to be endured through all its ordeals: when she was eighteen, her mother gave her the 1998 book “Domestic Tranquility,” by F. Carolyn Graglia, a three-hundred-and-seventy-two-page “brief against feminism” arguing that women find true fulfillment as wives and mothers. Lenz wed her first boyfriend, on the campus of their Christian college, then subordinated her ambitions to raising their children; after twelve years of marriage, she set out to make a new life. She burned her wedding dress in a friend’s back-yard chiminea. “Do you want to know how I finally got my husband to do his fair share?” she writes. “Court-ordered fifty-fifty custody, that’s how.”

Lenz, in her enthusiasm, makes a wildly sweeping case, one with an obvious heroine (her) and equally obvious villains (her ex-husband, also all husbands, patriarchy as a whole). Not every woman who weds today feels that she’s been “pushed” down the aisle by “the entire history of Western civilization,” as Lenz puts it. Yet, even in its propensity for overbroad extrapolation, her book conveys the pain and pettiness of divorce: the difficulty of disentangling two adult lives, and the unhappiness it would take to make that difficulty look worthwhile. And the domestic asymmetries that frustrated Lenz are the same ones second-wave feminists protested—they’ve persisted, even as the laws governing marriage and divorce have grown less onerous. The world changed plenty between “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Marriage Story,” but all the old complaints still inspire couples to end marriages and, in turn, to make divorces themselves more bitter and fraught. This is a reality hard to detect in the serene pages of “No Fault”—a story of divorce that somehow lacks conflict, friction, or mess.

If marriage is not as legally binding as it once was, one reason is the emergence of no-fault divorce. Ronald Reagan signed America’s first no-fault law in 1969, as governor of California; New York, the last state to follow suit, did so in 2010. (This was late enough that the New York law wasn’t yet in effect when Elizabeth Gilbert went through the costly divorce that became the impetus for “Eat, Pray, Love”—a detail Mlotek includes in her omnivorous compendium of pop-culture divorce lore.) Before the no-fault era, getting divorced required proof of wrongdoing, such as abuse or adultery. The rules weren’t impossible to circumvent, but doing so took time, money, and perhaps mild perjury. Mlotek quotes a paper on postwar divorce cases in Chicago which dryly notes the “remarkable” number of spouses who reportedly struck their partners exactly twice on the face, without provocation, and left visible marks, thereby enabling them to meet Illinois’s minimum legal definition of “cruelty.” No-fault was neither the beginning of divorce nor the end of marriage.

Not everyone agrees, of course. Stories of no-fault divorce still have a surprising power to inspire outrage, at least among a certain readership. Such stories often concern couples whose divorces are complicated by the presence of children, even (maybe especially) when the stories are told with confidence and conviction. In 2021, the journalist Honor Jones published an essay in The Atlantic about ending her marriage, called “How I Demolished My Life.” In it, Jones describes realizing that she felt trapped by the suburban domesticity she’d once wanted, selling the house she and her husband had bought in Pennsylvania, and establishing what sounds like a solid co-parenting arrangement for their three children in Brooklyn. A chorus of voices emerged to denounce her selfishness. The conservative commentator Rod Dreher wrote, “What tears me up about this essay is not so much what she has done—as bad as that is—but that Honor Jones is proud of what she has done, so much so that she wrote about it in the national magazine for which she works.” She was getting away with something, he seemed to believe. “Just think,” he urged readers, “how you would feel if a man had written this essay.”

J. D. Vance, another prominent critic of divorce, was once—like Mlotek and Lenz—a millennial memoirist drawing broad cultural lessons from his family history. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” his parents’ separation is the wellspring of childhood suffering; his grandparents’ home is the one source of stability, and he idealizes their volatile union. Speaking at a California high school in 2021, Vance lamented the modern view of marriage as “a basic contract, like any other business deal.” Marriages such as his grandparents’ were “unhappy,” but they lasted. By “making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear,” Vance told his audience, the ethos of no-fault divorce had unleashed “very, very real family dysfunction.” He called it “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace.”

Vance’s rhetoric represents a long-standing conservative religious opposition to liberalized divorce—the sort of politics Lenz absorbed in her evangelical childhood. Today, though, this style of anti-divorce scaremongering has found a new counterpart in the so-called manosphere. There, the message is sometimes less “make sure you stay married” and more “avoid wedlock in the first place.” The two factions differ in their attitude toward marriage but share a sense that divorce is dangerous, and too easy to get. The influencer and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate has said that there is “zero advantage to marriage” for men in the Western world, because marriage destroys men when women leave, and “it’s very common that women leave.” (Joe Rogan, ever the open-minded man on the street, has conceded that men’s-rights activists make some good points on this front: “I know men who have gotten really fucked over in divorce.”) Divorce gives a human shape to the fear that anything a man loses was taken by a woman.

The most famous and most dubious divorce statistic holds that half of all marriages end in divorce. Only slightly less famous—but much more credible—is the claim that women file for divorce about seventy per cent of the time. To Lenz, it’s proof that women badly need an escape hatch. To Tate, presumably, it’s proof that women just want to break your heart and get your money. The same figure fits seamlessly into competing narratives, suggesting the totalizing intractability of their opposition—the two sides are left squabbling over ownership of the facts like a couple splitting marital assets.

In this context, “No Fault” enacts its own quiet backlash against a zero-sum outlook on divorce. Unlike either the divorce memoirists or the manosphere guys, Mlotek doesn’t want to draft personal stories into service of an argument—she barely wants to tell the stories to begin with. Periodically, people prod her for details on her marriage’s end, and she declines to gratify them. “You never even tweeted about your divorce,” a friend chides at one point. Even a reader slightly frustrated with Mlotek’s evasiveness has to sympathize with her in the face of such a complaint. In “Sucker Punch,” Scaachi Koul writes that part of the pain of ending her marriage was struggling to address it online, after all the public stories and jokes she’d told over the years. “Writing about yourself for the internet means pulling off little pieces of your body and letting them walk around without you,” she reflects. “The internet is a record of my failures in so many ways, but none more blatant than how the person I loved most in the world and I failed each other.” Mlotek’s resistance to self-exposure, like her early coupledom, marks her as a generational anomaly. It sets her athwart a dominant feminist ethos of recent years, one that seems to animate memoirists such as Lenz: the belief that personal testimonials could be a tool of resistance, and that the privacy of bedrooms tended to protect the status quo.

But privacy, and particularly the privacy that exists within marriage, has also served in the no-fault era as a legal basis for rights—to contraception and other forms of sexual freedom—that are increasingly under attack. The idea that your marriage is your own (secular, individual) business is the kind of thing that bedevils religious conservatives. One imagines Vance gasping in horror at Mlotek’s account of the “airiness” with which she makes her wedding vows, recalling “how easy it was to swear I would want what I had”—as if marriage might be a commitment to one’s desires rather than a commitment to another person, or a role in a community. Reactionary and revolutionary views of marriage alike offer narrative satisfactions that the liberal view seems to lack. Eulogizing a marriage undertaken in this spirit presents a storytelling challenge: it requires inventing the stakes yourself.

Mlotek—like many brides and grooms writing custom vows—doesn’t quite pull it off. But she does make privacy and its place in love feel idealistic and almost subversive. Her book is subtitled “A Memoir of Romance and Divorce,” and her reticence is perhaps the most romantic thing about it, testifying to an abiding intimacy that transcends any legal relationship. After she and her husband decide to separate, she manages to avoid telling most of her family and friends for nearly a year. “Maybe not wanting to tell the people who mattered most was about giving my husband and me one last secret,” she writes. “One last thing we would know about who we were to each other before everyone else decided they knew who we were.” Insofar as a book about divorce must propose some definition of marriage, this seems to be hers: We knew something no one else did. ♦