Summary and Reviews of No Fault by Haley Mlotek

Media Reviews

Bookforum Thoughtful and elegantly equivocal ... A Didionish blend of fatalism and lucidity ... No Fault brims with movies, images, other books, other people's anecdotes ... Reading her book can feel like sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by an unmarshaled welter of artifacts. There is richness here, and exhilaration.

The Washington Post An investigation, an invocation, a mood ... No Fault is a ferment of ideas and references — it contains sharp forays into the history of divorce and shrewd readings of books like Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages — but its true innovation is formal. The divorce it memorializes is both personal and narrative: Mlotek leaves the comforts of her marriage in search of chaos, and her story strays from the neat staple of sequence in search of stranger surprises.

Vanity Fair Haley Mlotek presents a fascinating and fraught history of marriage and divorce, offering sweeping context alongside intimate specificity, from her own split from her high school sweetheart to those writers like Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Deborah Levy.

Vulture Marriage might be archaic and sexist, but Mlotek takes care to show how it is also a deeply intimate union, one that is difficult to study without looking inward. This is an insightful, tender exploration of the desires that draws people together — and the rifts that push them apart.

Bustle What, exactly, does a divorce symbolize in the 21st century? And how do women today navigate this hyperprevalent but still hyperpersonal experience? These are the questions No Fault seeks to answer through a deft mix of social commentary, reportage, and personal reflection.

Cultured Mlotek's hypnotic, slippery yet precise prose dips in and out of genres, gliding between memoir, film criticism, socio-political history, and philosophy to reveal the myriad meanings divorce carries in our culture. She is adamant about ambiguity, devoted to the revelatory potential of ambivalence as much as the pleasures of going all in, indulging in the 'precipitous gullibility' that allows us to believe in a story, or fall in love.

Harper's Bazaar Blending research, reporting, and personal anecdote, Mlotek deftly identifies what links the intimately personal with the macro political in all romantic relationships.

Lit Hub Haley Mlotek uses her own breakup only as a jumping off point to grapple with the idea of divorce as a cultural phenomenon, choosing to look outward rather than inward, using films and literature and history as grounding elements in her winding meditation on the subject. Another revelatory addition to the collection of books on marriage and its endings, No Fault captivatingly provides a review of many other artistic depictions of marriage and divorce as well as offers an elucidating peek into her first-hand experience.

Los Angeles Review of Books Mlotek seizes divorce, holding her subject against the light and observing its many surfaces, from all angles... . There's romance to be found in every corner of Mlotek's textured and tender account of heartbreak and separation.

The Atlantic [No Fault] is neither chronicle, nor testimony, nor confession; rather, it is a personal and cultural inquiry into the significance of divorce, and by extension marriage, that emphatically rejects resolution... . Those searching for catharsis or an applicable remedy to their own heartaches and existential muddles will find only one definitive answer—that no person can ever fully know her own mind... . [A] tender exploration into the obscurities of human intimacy.

The Boston Globe Mlotek writes about history, heartbreak, and hope.

The Millions A wise and distinctly modern accounting of the end of a marriage, and what it means on a personal, social, and literary level.

Vogue We've socialized divorce as one of the worst outcomes that can follow marriage, but what if it were simply something that took place in some people's lives, without undue baggage and with the potential for a whole artistic genre to be created around it? ... The story that Mlotek tells about the end of her marriage–about all marriages, really–is entirely her own, just as a divorce should belong entirely to the couple at its center, and I look forward to seeing what story she'll choose to tell next.

W Magazine No Fault explores that painful fault line between the highly personal yet statistically common experience of ending a marriage. She weaves personal essays and social and literary commentary together to investigate the enduring institution of marriage and its purpose in the modern era—and her own particular journey toward reinventing herself as a millennial divorcée.

Booklist Mlotek writes with wry and poignant fluidity, her wit almost offhanded, her avidity for understanding, candor, and provocative syllogisms magnetic. The result is an intimate, astute, and captivating inquiry into the conventions and mysteries of marriage and divorce.

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...[A] shrewd testament to personal agency and self-definition...This raw and reflective account stands out in the crowded field of divorce memoirs.

Kirkus Reviews An uncertain and stifled stab at understanding the changing significance of marriage and divorce.

 Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of National Book Award finalist All This Could Be Different No Fault is a remarkable work of nonfiction: sensitive, deftly researched, tender, wise. Mlotek's writing is beautifully alive to the world, alive to the histories of marriage and divorce, alive to the hardest thing to pin down on the page: the truths of who we are and have been, in all their shimmering, quantum states.

 Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure Singular, dazzling and wry, No Fault weaves the personal and political in an elegant exploration of divorce's cultural position, and of what it means to take that step yourself—moving onto ground both historically well-trodden, and unimaginably alien. There is such clarity and tenderness set out in the pristine sentences of this book.

 Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book Sharp, smart, and searingly personal, No Fault is an ideal hybrid of rigorous reporting, social commentary, and personal reflection on the nature of love and divorce. Mlotek writes like a dream, and draws us close as she ponders what makes a marriage endure or crumble. You'll want to join her on this journey.

Reader Reviews

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