The year 2024 also saw the publication of Sara Glass’s Kissing Girls on Shabbat , a moving memoir by an ex-Hasidic lesbian who divorces two different men over the course of the book. Poet Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful came out the previous year. It is the one that got the latest wave of the cultural conversation going—one linked to broader discussions of men lagging behind women in education and achievement and will- ingness to load dishwashers and just generally not being worth the bother. There are bad men out there, and mediocre ones, and if you’re married to one—per a certain discourse, at least—you’d be well rid of him. Following #MeToo, and—perhaps more to the point—a pandemic that saw many women effectively foisted out of the work- force and back into the domestic sphere, male misbehaviour and inequitable chore distribution were suddenly of tremendous main- stream interest. Whether the cultural preoccupation with divorce will persist long enough for 2025’s No Fault to hit a nerve remains to be seen. Mlotek is an accomplished writer, with bylines including The New York Times , Hazlitt , and The New Yorker . But how many times, in a short span, can variations of the same story be told? I had a bit of déjà vu while reading, and it occurred to me that the structure, locations, demographics, topics, and politics recall Nona Willis Aronowitz’s 2022 Bad Sex . The structure is the easiest part to address: No Fault and Bad Sex both intersperse the author’s own divorce stories with in-depth historical research. Aronowitz did her homework in the area of feminist history, while Mlotek’s is a mix of cultural analysis of divorce-themed books and movies and a how- we-got-here historical synthesis of no-fault divorce. Like Aronowitz, Mlotek had a brief youthful marriage—formal- ized, both women are careful to spell out, for bureaucratic reasons (Mlotek’s visa-related, Aronowitz’s to do with health insurance). We
are not in the square, stuffy, so-last-season realm of women who plan elaborate weddings and think they’re only complete once they’ve snagged a husband. Sure, such women may still exist, but these particular ones are not in milieus where women revel un- ironically in bachelorette parties and all the accompanying frills. Both move in circles where it is by no means expected of a young woman to be Mrs. So-and-So, and seem to chafe at the dissonance between their self-understandings as modern and the facts-on-the- ground link between their lives and those of however many millions of other women past, present, and future. Women who, historically, often lacked other options. The biggest difference between the two books is that Mlotek choos- es divorce—not sexual dissatisfaction—as her throughline, providing thematic unity in what would otherwise be a large collection of short essays. W riting in Publishers Weekly in 2020, Brooke Warner distin- guished between “books that are about the writer’s whole life,” which Warner argues are properly deemed autobiography, and “what memoir is supposed to be: a slice of life, ideally held together by a concept or a theme.” A hybrid genre has emerged in recent dec- ades, particularly in feminist writing: books in which an author weaves her own life story into a broader one about society at large. It’s come to be expected, as though readers require both things not from books collectively (as is reasonable) but from each individual one. The memoir, as a form, offers something juicy and confession- al—the gossipy pleasures of peeking into a real stranger’s life—but also, these days, an argument linking the author’s experiences to something generalizable, ideally with a world-improving compon- ent. The quality sought in memoirists, for which they are praised, is self-awareness, both the personality trait of knowing how you come
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