Excerpt from No Fault by Haley Mlotek, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I once watched as a person trying to explain something took her pen to paper. Here was a circle, she said, and this was the way most people experienced their memories: as events linked in one round dance with each other, the lines between the beginning of their consciousness and a space stretching out in front yet to be lived. But then there was the way it happened, and the way it was remembered: as a spiral that started low, grew wide, and lapped around and around, touching occasionally, as we perhaps regressed or lagged or repeated a bad habit or spent time in a stage we thought was over. That's the way I find myself trying to describe these years. Not backward and forward, or up and down, but around and around and around and around.

I, like so many, first inherited my knowledge of divorce from my family. Then came my own divorce. On the last day my husband and I lived together, I gave him my largest suitcase—the one I had used often during the one year we were married, traveling for work away from our home, and almost never in the twelve years of our relationship that preceded it—and watched the beginning of him packing. I left before he finished. It took one more year after that day before I told most of my friends and family and loved ones. In that year my life changed so much I couldn't recognize it as my own, while many more days revealed only what I should have already known. Maybe I was waiting until I could tell the difference. Maybe I was waiting until I felt ready. Mostly I was just waiting.

Excerpted from No Fault by Haley Mlotek. Copyright © 2025 by Haley Mlotek. Excerpted by permission of Viking. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.