To qualify as book-worthy, it helps if a woman’s life story can be connected to something society-wide.
none of your business. This has the unfortunate effect of making these parts that much more compelling. In my initial read, I found myself rushing through the objectively better-fleshed-out parts of the book, the ones about old novels, movies, and television shows about marital tumult (particularly The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd , a 1972 cinematic precursor to modern reality television), to get to where she might divulge something about her business. Business that is, of course, no business of mine. In an ideal world, perhaps, we’d have a book about divorce from someone privately inspired to do so by their own. Instead, we have a half-memoir from someone who—and who can blame her?—seems very possibly too private of a person to write a memoir. In a review of Leslie Jamison’s Splinters , Mlotek writes, “I some- times wonder if the divorce memoir, or any art about divorce, fulfills needs that the legal process of dissolving a marriage—with its con- ference rooms and paperwork—doesn’t satisfy.” I suspect it does, but not in the way she means. Divorce allows Mlotek a pretext to write a book. It is Mlotek’s status as a divorcée that makes her part of a lineage, a literary tradition, a topic of perennial feminist interest. There is a divorce canon, much of it explored in No Fault . Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Jamaica Kincaid, Jenny Offill, Elizabeth Gilbert, and, now, Haley Mlotek. T o review a memoir is, in a sense, to review a person. It isn’t really: the reader doesn’t know the memoirist personally, or if they do, then that outside information is informing their judgments, and the book itself is a side note. But for the typical reader, all you can judge is a character who shares a name and biographical de- tails with the author, not a fictional creation but a construction all the same. In non-literary terms, you know the person behind the memoir the way you know a person you’ve never met through their very detailed Facebook profile. It nevertheless feels judgmental, ungenerous, ad hominem , to re- spond negatively to a memoir. It feels wrong to judge the life choices or interpretations thereof of this person who never asked for your input. If I say I found No Fault a bit uninspiring, it seems as if I am casting judgment on Mlotek’s life story, or—heaven forbid—sug- gesting that my own is any more riveting. (I promise it is not.) Whether this is or is not the book for you depends on whether the fol- lowing sentence would have you more riveted or put off: “The emphasis on [Betty] Friedan and the cultural phenomenon that was Mystique ig- nores the work of women of color within organizations such as NOW, as
well as within other radical or leftist organizations, and in tandem with organizations distinctly founded for the autonomy of women of color, by women of color.” I read this and thought, yes, this is a known thing about femin- ism, as well as a long-since-requisite box a white feminist author must check. I’m not sure who, in 2025 needs the corrective that feminism wasn’t just Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Anyone who could possibly care about intersectional feminism has read give or take the same sentences in books, articles, and TikToks. By the time Mlotek mentions iconic Black feminist Audre Lorde, it has already been established that this is a book that will be citing Audre Lorde, to an audience of people with Audre Lorde quotes on their Insta- gram dating from 2020, if not earlier. That said, I now know far more than I once did about Lorde’s divorce. What Lorde’s marital split has to do with Mlotek’s, I’m still unclear, but I find myself in the awk- ward position of wishing the straight white lady author had said even more about Lorde and less about herself. There are feminist analyses aplenty about the way that seeming- ly equitable heterosexual relationships evolve into something more 1950s-ish than the parties themselves anticipated. This didn’t hap- pen here. Nor did Mlotek go off men, either in a fed-up sense or in the Lorde sense of preferring women. They didn’t have kids, so their divorce doesn’t prompt any outsiders’ opining about whether they might have stayed together for the children. These are just two people who, for paperwork reasons, had to pay a lawyer’s fee in order to fully break up. Over the course of their more-than-decade-long relationship, Mlotek went from a teenager impressed by a popular and aca- demically accomplished boyfriend to, perhaps, the more accom- plished member of that same couple. They broke up for the usual reasons high school or college sweethearts break up: growing up, growing apart. “[S]omething between my ex-husband and me had shifted when I got a job more like the one he had; it was true much of the identity of our relationship rested on us both believ- ing that he took care of me, in many different material ways; it was true that by the time we left each other I had begun to won- der if changing so much of my life had changed the way we saw each other.” Had Mlotek attempted to tell this to the drunk lady at the party, that woman would have very likely nodded off. The gist of No Fault is that even in the absence of drama that would keep an audience glued to its seats, sometimes a marriage just doesn’t work. n
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