This review was originally published in the Winter 2025 magazine from The Canadian Jewish News—which will be rebranded this spring as Scribe Quarterly. Click here for information on how to get a copy.
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No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
Haley Mlotek
(McClelland & Stewart)
“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)
In No Fault, Haley Mlotek’s first book—which was published on Feb. 18—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 overlapping biographical particulars (we’re both millennial Jewish women writers who’ve lived in New York and Toronto), I don’t know the author 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 breakup 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 Feminine Chaos podcast co-host Kat Rosenfield wrote of the “glut of divorce memoirs.” The past year has seen Lyz Lenz’s bestselling This American Ex-Wife and Leslie Jamison’s similarly well-received Splinters, two books covered jointly in The New York Times book review section.
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 willingness 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 workforce and back into the domestic sphere, male misbehaviour and inequitable chore distribution were suddenly of tremendous mainstream 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. (The connections surely helped get this book promoted with excerpts in other major publications.) 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—formalized, 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 unironically 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 chooses divorce—not sexual dissatisfaction—as her throughline, providing thematic unity in what would otherwise be a large collection of short essays.
Writing in Publishers Weekly in 2020, Brooke Warner distinguished 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 decades, 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 confessional—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 component. The quality sought in memoirists, for which they are praised, is self-awareness, both the personality trait of knowing how you come across to others and, on a bigger scale, understanding, demographically, 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 celebrity. 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 memoir 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-research 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 from being unusual and therefore remarkable (which is fun or interesting 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 publishing backstory gets at what No Fault is and where it fits in a publishing 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 external pressures. Did she sincerely feel her own experience was a Platonic example of a phenomenon meriting sociological or historical 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 chapters 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 dissertation-writers and academics to shame. A chapter relying almost exclusively 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 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 sometimes wonder if the divorce memoir, or any art about divorce, fulfills needs that the legal process of dissolving a marriage—with its conference 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.
To 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 details 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 respond 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—suggesting 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 following sentence would have you more riveted or put off: “The emphasis on [Betty] Friedan and the cultural phenomenon that was Mystique ignores 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 feminism, 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 Instagram 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 awkward 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 seemingly equitable heterosexual relationships evolve into something more 1950s-ish than the parties themselves anticipated. This didn’t happen 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 academically accomplished boyfriend to, perhaps, the more accomplished 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 believing 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 wonder 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.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
This review was originally published in the Winter 2025 magazine from The Canadian Jewish News—which will be rebranded this spring as Scribe Quarterly. Click here for information on how to get a copy.
