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The last few years’ buzziest nonfiction releases have included several powerful divorce memoirs, from Sarah Manguso’s Liars to Leslie Jamison’s Splinters. Joining the canon this month is Haley Mlotek’s No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, a book that takes the compuslvie self-disclosure that’s occasionally characterized the genre and turns it on its head.
Without revealing every last detail of her relationship with her ex-husband (or seeming to sanitize her story), Mlotek communicates her specific mental state during the breakdown of her marriage, delving into her complex relationship with divorce itself—something that goes back to her own parents’ split and her mother’s work as a mediation and marriage counseling practitioner. The result is a comprehensive, complex, and emotionally resonant social history of marital dissatisfaction made actionable.
Vogue spoke to Mlotek about drawing inspiration from a single sentence in a Elizabeth Hardwick novel, her favorite divorce movie, what not to ask a recently divorced friend, more.
Vogue: How does it feel to be so public about an experience that women haven’t always been encouraged to talk about?
Haley Mlotek: Something I’ve thought about a lot is that there’s sort of this canon of divorce literature that I’m so glad to be a part of, and all the books are so different, but something that we do have in common is often a kind of opacity about the details themselves. In a practical sense, I do feel like the real story is still very private, and only for the people who I want to know about it, and the book is something entirely different. You know, it’s an idea that I was able to turn into a thought that turned into what I was able to do on the page, and that automatically changes it from being a memory into something that’s actually tangible and lives out in the world without me. But more realistically, it’s terrifying. It’s very scary. I was prepared for people to want to know more details, but of course, anticipating the book’s release is very different from experiencing it.
I’ve been thinking about this with a lot of the books I’m reading lately, especially yours and Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood, and wanted to ask: Have you found anything that feels helpful for you in terms of determining what feels like a story you want to tell as it relates to divorce, and what you want to keep for yourself?
I also loved Jamie’s book so much for exactly that reason, because I think the type of writing that I’ve always loved best and really responded to is nonfiction that uses the author as another type of tool for the writing itself. Of course, there’s definitely an element of voyeurism that I love—I love gossip—so writing that feels conversational, or like somebody sharing a secret, is fun on its own terms. But really, I think the best memoir writing knows that the author is a narrator of an experience, and that their insight into what happened or how it happened is really a tool for revealing something much bigger than just an individual experience.
Of course, everybody is entirely singular, and nobody has the same experience as anybody else exactly, but at the same time, as we’ve seen, there are so many feelings that really are so common, and even if the details aren’t right, watching another person put into words their version of an experience you recognize creates this sense of being in conversation with both another person and with yourself when you’re the one reading it. So that’s what I hope I’m doing.
Forgive me if this is something a lot of people have asked you, but do you have favorite divorce narratives?
The writer that I go back to all the time when I really feel like I’ve forgotten how to think is Elizabeth Hardwick. When I talk about the way writers use themselves as narrators, I am thinking about her novel Sleepless Nights and how there is so much of her autobiography in the book, but the facts of her marriage are not really included in that novel in the same way that some of her friendships or her family history are turned into fiction. Really, one of the only references to being married is this one sentence that I think goes, “We were a ‘we’ once,” and just that hint of an entire history, that shadow of a huge story that’s just behind the words on the page, is something I so love. I love writing that has an iceberg feeling; you can see a little bit of it over the surface, but you know that there’s so much more underneath. So that’s definitely one of them.
I also love Deborah Levy’s memoirs. I love the way she writes about work and family and friendship in the “after” time of being divorced. I definitely love to watch movies about divorce, and I’m always looking for more. The one I probably watch the most is An Unmarried Woman; it’s a movie, so it’s different, but it does have an almost diary-like feeling to it where we really are just watching how this main character spends her days after a divorce.
Is there anything you think we should stop asking divorced people, or maybe that we should start asking?
I always joke that when people tell me that they’re getting divorced, I always say, “I’m so sorry, and congratulations.” I think balancing the fact of the grief with some permission to celebrate is important for recent divorcees. My instinct was to say, we should probably stop asking divorced people or people who have just broken up “Why?” or “What happened?” But actually, I understand that sometimes it’s cathartic to really get it out there. I think maybe, like with everything, the best question to ask a recently divorced person is, “What would you like me to ask you about?”
You write about growing up in an environment where divorce was very much at the forefront. Do you think that affected your framing of your own divorce story, or do they feel like totally separate things?
I think it absolutely must have, but the truth is, I sometimes wonder if I would even know, because I have nothing to compare it to. We’re both children of divorce, and pretty much everyone I know has some divorce in their family, or now is divorced themselves, or has some other really close relationship to divorce, but mine is definitely a little different in how professionalized it is. Like, I always joke that divorce is truly our family business. But really, it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s my specific experience and what is sort of the collective culture, right?
I know it’s only been a few days since No Fault came out, but has that experience been lining up with what you had imagined? Does it feel different?
It’s weird. Like most big, precipice events, the anticipation doesn’t really prepare you for the actual time of living in it. When I was writing the book, I would tell myself, “Oh, well, I just have to get through this draft, I just have to get through this edit,” and now I catch myself being like, “Well, I just have to get through this phase of it being out in the world.” And then I remember that, actually, this phase lasts forever.
