The Brooklyn Rail

First came the marriage plot; then came the commercial divorce memoir, an epiphanic form relishing little pleasures and self-discovery afforded by international travel.

Both genres were new once. Now, they each have their practitioners, who might uphold their original conventions, cant them somehow, or add on a self-aware, metafictional layer. More than enough moving novels emerge from experiments in applying these forms to contemporary life. But there must be a story structure more fitting to how we love, date, and split up these days, when divorce is no longer a cause for denying a bank loan and marriage is less compulsory than ever. Right?

In her wise and thorough book, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, Haley Mlotek raises this question. In her investigation, she draws on sources ranging from 1940s comedies, ’50s self-help titles, ’60s manifestos, proto-reality TV shows, and her own memories of her mother’s divorce counseling practice, run out of the basement of her childhood home. (Mlotek answered phones on her mother’s behalf when she wasn’t busy being a preteen, watching The Amanda Show or skimming dELiA*s catalogs.)

More than a memoir, No Fault is an inquisitive survey of the genre Mlotek refers to as “the divorce plot.” “If such a thing can be said to exist,” she qualifies.

Beyond all the media mentioned above, she unpacks letters from Adrienne Rich about Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell’s separation (“I think that people are ultimately more important than poems,” Rich writes); she close-reads Audre Lorde’s writings before and after her marriage to Edwin Rollins; and she weeps while reading Grace Paley’s “Wants” aloud to the man she started seeing after her own marriage ended. Refusing to provide an easy answer to the question of why or how, she instead looks for meaning in her favorite movies and books, re-watching and re-reading some over and over, attuned most of all to mood and texture.

“Every writer who cares about goodness not just as a form of craft but as a principle relies on the same technique,” Mlotek writes. “A shading of the borders around the story, a writing or expression that gives depth to the details, sensations, and emotions of an experience as an exchange instead of saying what really happened.”

In other words, a work of art ought not to be treated like a legal battle, a painstaking recounting of facts, or a cut-and-dried drama featuring villains and heroines. This point is in keeping with the memoir’s title, which refers to the right to file for a divorce without assigning blame or naming a cause. Now, couples in most countries can choose to separate without demonstrating that harm has been done—a nearly impossible task in domestic spaces.

As a side effect, even the merely dissatisfied are freer to divorce without explaining themselves, which isn’t exactly new, just newly legal. Mlotek reminds us that the divorce plot’s predecessor, the marriage plot, emerged in the Victorian era, which was messier than we give it credit for today. “Better single than miserably married” might sound like unsolicited advice a well-meaning friend would offer today, but it’s an Austen-era adage.

Now that marriage and the ways we’re compelled to describe it both legally and artistically aren’t so hemmed in by dated structures, how might writers approach the telling of a love story, a marriage, a heartbreak, a separation, or a remarriage?

In her survey, Mlotek considers the legacy of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, which looms over the genre. She evaluates Gilbert’s divorce plot fairly, not dismissing it purely on the basis of its marketing campaign, but she’s more appreciative of writers like Deborah Levy, oblique nouveau-modernists who resist the tidiness of parable. More often, Mlotek positions herself against narrative altogether. “Not settling poses a problem for narrative,” she writes. And, later, “there is no narrative that compares to the recklessness of an ordinary day, of an average life lived.”

Still, she shares her memories of visiting her grandmother’s house, impressed by her glamorous references to her ex-husbands, plural; of friend groups formed and dissipated; of vacations paid for with second and third jobs; of chunky shoes bought and sold. These vignettes aren’t static; most hinge on moments of change.

So, there’s slipperiness in No Fault between social strictures and narrative form, which Mlotek treats at times as a homogenous, oppressive category rather than a means of describing any work of art that deals with change over time, whether it depends on a dead convention or a brand-new experiment.

This doesn’t go totally unacknowledged. When she tries opening her marriage, Mlotek reads the polyamorous person’s bible, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s The Ethical Slut; later on, she wryly observes, “an entire vocabulary existed, and I believed that if you somehow used it correctly, any bad feeling could be made to evaporate.” So, even her go at openness failed to totally satisfy its narrative promise.

By the end, Mlotek’s memoir does tell a story. Her close relationships with friends inform her taste in films, which shapes much of her argument; and her eye for beauty, which she picked up from her grandmother, leads to lyrical and funny writing about her relationships with other sensualists.

Still, it feels right when she concludes that her life post-wedding and post-divorce—like the broader cultural arc away from conventional stories of love, commitment, and romantic split-ups—is ongoing.