No more to it than that
Trying to make sense of the burgeoning wave of divorce lit
BY PHOEBE MALTZ BOVY
“You’re getting fed up with whose company? Bruce’s? Oh well that’s only natural, he’s your husband.”—Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced “Bouquet”) in Keeping Up Appearances (1995) I n No Fault , Haley Mlotek’s first book, slated for release in Feb- ruary, the author recalls “a very drunk woman” she had once known accosting her at a party to ask some rather blunt questions about her divorce. “‘You just decided you didn’t want to be married? Or was there more to it than that?’” To which Mlotek responds, in an aside to readers, “There was a great deal more, but I declined to share with her.” The intoxicated lady, c’est moi . Not literally: despite some overlap- ping biographical particulars (we’re both millennial Jewish women writers who’ve lived in New York and Toronto), I don’t know the auth- or and thus have never hassled her about her personal life. But I am the simple soul who picked up a divorce memoir naively assuming I’d learn, therein, why the author got divorced. The implied audience for No Fault is too sophisticated to demand such answers. Or maybe there aren’t any: “[M]y friends and I are alike in that we both had no idea why my marriage ended. (We are different in that they think they can find the answer, and I know I never will.)” Can a whole entire book about divorce centre on a marital break- up that happened for reasons unknown even to the instigator? In a way it has to, because this is what separates No Fault from its rather crowded field. Divorce lit is having a moment. In a column a few months ago, my friend and podcast co-host Kat Rosenfield wrote of the “glut of divorce memoirs.” The past year has seen Lyz Len z’s bestselling This Amer- ican Ex-Wife and Leslie Jamison’s similarly well-received Splinters , two books covered jointly in The New York Times book review section.
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