The memoir, as a form, offers something juicy and confessional— but also, these days, an argument linking the author’s experiences to something generalizable, ideally with a world-improving component.
from being unusual and therefore remarkable (which is fun or in- teresting to read), nor from being so engagingly told that story feels relatable even to people who cannot necessarily relate to any of the specifics therein (my personal preference), but from its role as a case study for a bigger and ever-so-worthy phenomenon. This pub- lishing backstory gets at what No Fault is and where it fits in a pub- lishing landscape. Mlotek’s own divorce is her Exhibit A in her book about divorce generally. Whenever I read a book in this style, I find myself wondering if there is one thread the author would have honed in on, absent ex- ternal pressures. Did she sincerely feel her own experience was a Platonic example of a phenomenon meriting sociological or histor- ical discussion? Did she want to write a memoir and tack on the historical digressions for seriousness and heft? Or would she have liked to write a different sort of non-fiction book but conclude that if she left her own life story out of it, no one would care? Which part is the book I should be reading, and which was tacked on? With No Fault , the answer isn’t particularly ambiguous. Early on in the book, Mlotek writes that she’s “always preferred reading to reality.” She admits to being “evasive,” adding, “I want you to ask if I’ve read Anna Karenina . I do not want you to ask what I would do for love.” She has read, watched, and synthesized a truly impressive number of works about divorce, including scholarly ones. The chap- ters about film and literature (topics include Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and remarriage movies across the decades) are more enjoyable reads than the history ones, not because cultural criticism always appeals to me more (it doesn’t) but because the choices there seem more idiosyncratic and therefore surprising. Mlotek notes she was a lacklustre student who dropped out of college, but props to her, the smoothly written result puts disserta- tion-writers and academics to shame. A chapter relying almost exclu- sively on a book by the Harvard historian Nancy F. Cott should, yes, have used more sources, but she narrates well enough that it was only at the end that I noticed this. Not for the first time, an autodidact exhibits more aptitude than most who’ve sat through all the seminars. Even the drier parts are livelier than they need to be. Mlotek comes across as someone who genuinely enjoys learning new things and teach others what she’s discovered. The passages in which Mlotek discusses her own marriage sound, by contrast, like someone telling you a story under duress, where they’re leaving the key bits out because quite frankly it’s
across to others and, on a bigger scale, understanding, demograph- ically, where you fit into the grand scheme of things. The author who fails to sufficiently acknowledge her privilege gets called out for this, by critics, Goodreads reviewers, or whichever other naysayers. As a business matter, memoirs sell best if the author’s a celeb- rity. But if you’re not Prince Harry or Britney Spears and you want someone to read your thoughts on your own life, you have to make the case for why they should care. And the memoir that includes woven-in quantitative evidence or historical background is the one that gets taken seriously, the author commended for her ability to see beyond her own tiny life. To qualify as book-worthy, it helps if a woman’s life story can be connected to something society-wide, something on which polling data might be cited—if not demonstrable demographic change, a shift in cultural preoccupations. A decade ago, there were the books about single women, wherein the author was single (at least as of the work’s inception; relationship statuses are subject to change), but had taken her singledom as a prompt to dive into a bigger story. I’m referring to Kate Bolick’s 2015 Spinster , based on her 2011 Atlantic cover story titled “All the Single Ladies,” and Rebecca Traister’s 2016 book, titled All the Single Ladies , both references to Beyoncé’s catchy 2008 song, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It).” A Guardian reviewer inadvertently summed up not just All the Single Ladies but a certain type of format that has become ubiquitous: “Traister blends history, reportage and personal mem- oir to propose that the notion of marriage in American life has been and will be written by unmarried women.” In principle, there’s nothing wrong with mixing the intimate and the general. It’s unavoidable, to a point: on some level, every book is partly about more general subject matter and partly about its author, though the proportions vary tremendously. And there are times when advocacy is best done through personal testimony, as in Kissing Girls on Shabbat . The trouble with the 50-50 memoir-to-background-re- search ratio is that in practice, the most compelling personal stories are often too idiosyncratic to fall so neatly into what just so happens to be the most pressing systemic concerns. Along the same lines, the topics society most needs to grapple with do not typically align with what happens to be on the mind of a memoirist. The split approach has a way of flattening human experience, shortchanging both the individual stories and the general ones. In this understanding, a personal story derives its value neither
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