No Fault
A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
-
- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
One of NPR’s 2025 “Books We Love”
A Vogue & Vulture Best Book of the Year (So Far)
“Enigmatic, opalescent, so precise.” —Jia Tolentino
“An investigation, an invocation, a mood.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
“A personal accounting of heartache. . . . Mlotek’s writing reaches toward — and actually meets — poetry.” —Alissa Bennett, The New York Times Book Review
“A cool appraisal of millennial divorce.” —Emma Alpern, Vulture
An intimate and candid account of one of the most romantic and revolutionary of relationships: divorce
Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.” As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire, an ordeal that promised something better on the other side of something bad. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.
Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, No Fault is a deeply felt and radiant account of 21st century divorce—the remarkably common and seemingly singular experience, and what it reveals about our society and our desires for family, love, and friendship. Mlotek asks profound questions about what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power, all while charting a poignant and cathartic journey away from her own marriage towards an unknown future.
Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, No Fault is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025: Vogue, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, W, Bustle, Lit Hub, The Millions
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mlotek debuts with a frank combination of personal and social history that examines both her own divorce and shifting attitudes about the practice. Though Mlotek and her husband dated for 13 years before their wedding, they divorced after just one year of marriage. The experience led Mlotek to reexamine her lifelong comfort with the idea of divorce: her parents and grandparents got divorced; her mother worked as a certified divorce mediator; and when the author was 10, she casually suggested her mother leave her father. As Mlotek reflects on the signs that spelled danger for her relationship—she envied her peers, for example, who used postcollege breakups to help clarify their desires—she launches an inquiry into the history of divorce, tracking legal shifts and divorce rates across the 20th century while analyzing the divorces of such pop culture figures as Elizabeth Gilbert. What emerges is a shrewd testament to personal agency and self-definition, with Mlotek concluding that divorce "is the only way to find out who we are in those moments of pain, loss, and shame" after "standing up in front of the people you love and trust the most, only to say later that you hadn't known what you were doing." This raw and reflective account stands out in the crowded field of divorce memoirs.
