By “No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce” by Haley Mlotek

c.2025, Viking $28.00 293 pages

You knew it was coming, but the sound of the gavel made you jump.

It was so final, BANG!, so different from the soft music that started it all.

Somehow, the wood-onwood sound was a fitting way to end a marriage, like a door slamming or a log splitting. So how did you get to that point? As in the new memoir, “No Fault” by Haley Mlotek, is there anyone to catch the blame? After thirteen years together, it seemed they were meant for each other.

And yet, there they were: Haley Mlotek and her husband were heading for divorce, after a year during which they “barely managed to stay married…” In the untangling, she “cried, but only a little.”

Mlotek was no stranger to divorce. When she was ten years old, she advised her mother to leave her father – which didn’t happen, but because Mlotek’s mother was a divorce mediator, Mlotek possessed familiarity with the

process. “I understood,” says Mlotek, “That there were… far worse marriages than I ever saw or heard about.” She knew she wasn’t alone. During the Age of Enlightenment, societies thought that living one’s whole live with the same one person “was inherently wrong, unnatural.”

As for modern Western society, “there are many places to start” telling the story of divorce; it was, for instance, never as hard to get as some people think it was because attitudes changed from time to place. Once Americans began moving around the country and state and regional laws changed, too, it became even easier to dissolve a marriage.

It also became easier to forego marriage altogether. Says Mlotek, since the 1950s, the rate of “couples living together but not married” has steadily exploded. Mlotek herself was part of one of those couples, until she wasn’t.

Still, she says she’d do it again, though “I regret spending the last months of my marriage saying I’m sorry more than I said I love you.”

In a very big way, it’s almost as if “No Fault” can’t quite decide what kind of book it wants to be. Is it a nonfiction history of the dissolution or marriage? Is it a memoir?

A series of short but emotional essays? Or perhaps it’s a mosh-pit of the three that kaleidoscopes wildly, which works sometimes.

Take your pick. Author Haley Mlotek tells a good story – several of them, in fact – but readers may find themselves pulled in many different directions here. Her timeline of divorce runs deep, it can seem rather scholarly, and it mostly appears detached from the emotion that comes in chapters to follow. Your mind will need to switch gears often, which can be a problem if you’re highly invested in the memoir parts of Mlotek’s story, something that absolutely can happen – especially if you’re divorcing, too.

This isn’t a bad book – far from it, but it’s going to need a special kind of mindset to finish. If you can handle the mixture of it, you’ll love “No Fault.”

If you require lineal reading, though, jump aside.