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No Fault

A Memoir of Romance and Divorce

Author Haley Mlotek

Hardcover

$28.00 US

Penguin Adult HC/TR | Viking

5.73"W x 8.54"H x 1.06"D | 13 oz | 12 per carton

On sale Feb 18, 2025 | 304 Pages | 9781984879080

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A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025: Vogue, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, W, Bustle, Lit Hub, The Millions

“Enigmatic, opalescent, so precise.” —Jia Tolentino

“An investigation, an invocation, a mood.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

“A personal accounting of heartache. . . . Mlotek’s writing reaches toward — and actually meets — poetry.” —Alissa Bennett, The New York Times Book Review

“A cool appraisal of millennial divorce.” —Emma Alpern, Vulture

An intimate and candid account of one of the most romantic and revolutionary of relationships: divorce

Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.” As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire, an ordeal that promised something better on the other side of something bad. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.

Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, No Fault is a deeply felt and radiant account of 21st century divorce—the remarkably common and seemingly singular experience, and what it reveals about our society and our desires for family, love, and friendship. Mlotek asks profound questions about what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power, all while charting a poignant and cathartic journey away from her own marriage towards an unknown future.

Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, No Fault is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.

“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.”
—Vulture, “30 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025”

“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.”
—Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

“Mlotek’s treatment of divorce is measured, a bit opaque, and resolutely abstract. . . . No Fault enacts its own quiet backlash against a zero-sum outlook on divorce.”
—Molly Fischer, The New Yorker

“A personal accounting of heartache. . . . Mlotek’s writing reaches toward — and actually meets — poetry.”
—Alissa Bennett, The New York Times Book Review

“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.”
—Vanity Fair

“[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.”
—Rachel Vorona Cote, The Atlantic

“Tender . . . with shocking emotional intensity.”
—Constance Grady, Vox

“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.”
—Emmeline Clein, Cultured

“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.
—Hermione Hoby, Bookforum

“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.”
—Winnie Wang, Los Angeles Review of Books

“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.”
—Emma Specter, Vogue, “The Best Books of 2025—A Preview”

“Blending research, reporting, and personal anecdote, Mlotek deftly identifies what links the intimately personal with the macro political in all romantic relationships.”
—Harper’s Bazaar, “The 28 Most Highly-Anticipated Books of 2025”

“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.”
—W magazine

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

“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.”
—Lit Hub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

“A wise and distinctly modern accounting of the end of a marriage, and what it means on a personal, social, and literary level.”
—The Millions, “Most Anticipated: The Great Winter 2025 Book Preview”

“No Fault is a sui generis memoir of heartbreak and that nebulous, nameless period right afterward."
—Shelf Awareness

“Devastating and cathartic, a fusion of memoir and social commentary on marriage, divorce, romance, and what we mean when we talk about forever.”
—Language Arts (via Substack)

“An honest and wry look at 21st century divorce that asks questions about what divorce should be, who it’s for and why the institution of marriage maintains its power.”
—PureWow

“Haley Mlotek’s No Fault is a book about life escaping the story built to contain it. A history of heterosexual love, marriage, and divorce that’s suspicious of clean answers, a winsome and poignant recounting of her own romantic formation and deformation, No Fault is a cool and bracing corrective against those many over-certain stories of marriage’s dissolution that still dominate the form. Mlotek, as always, is a master of elegant destabilization; her sentences are enigmatic, opalescent, so precise as to feel like long-lost aphorisms. We’re lucky to have her on this subject—a writer who can work in the gap between the known and the unknown, the intimate and the public, the way our lives are always forged in material context and the unreachable particularities of the human heart.”
—Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror

“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.”
—Susan Orlean, New York Times bestselling author of The Library Book

“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.”
—Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of National Book Award finalist All This Could Be Different

“No Fault is a boldly intimate and political work that tenderly reveals the links between intimacy and politics; societal forces and emotional chaos. Mlotek is at home in contradiction, confidently traversing systemic analysis alongside the nuances of individual experience. From the rubble of old stories and structures, Mlotek has unearthed insights about love and endings that will stay with me for a long time.”
—Tavi Gevinson, actor and writer

“Haley Mlotek’s No Fault stuns with its emotional intensity, intelligence, and frankness. Her clarity and psychological sophistication produce acute insights. They come from experience, analyzing media, and researching divorce laws and their effects on society. In No Fault, a surprising, genre-bending work, Mlotek discusses the aftermath of her own divorce, with its indefinable, unexpected feelings and anguish. ‘To be wanted is one thing, to be left is another,’ she says. No Fault is unrelenting in its mission to expose the complexity of divorce. Not an absolute end, bringing freedom and relief, fault or no fault, Mlotek tells us. It can be hell, even if easier to get. No Fault is a formidable, important work.”
—Lynne Tillman, author of Mothercare

“Sentence for sentence, Haley’s personal and closely examined chronicle of marriage and divorce, ‘forever’ and ‘for now,’ is keenly observed and real fun.”
—Durga Chew-Bose, author of Too Much and Not the Mood

“I'm haunted by the sophistication of Haley Mlotek's insights and the tenderness with which they are delivered. No Fault is devastating because it is as full of pain as it is love. There is no other book on divorce or marriage—or romance—like this one.”
—Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman

“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.”
—Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

“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.”
—Bustle

“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.”
—Booklist

“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.”
—Publishers Weekly

Haley Mlotek is a writer, editor, and organizer. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Nation, Bookforum, The Paris Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Hazlitt, and n+1, among others. She is a founding member of the Freelance Solidarity Project in the National Writers Union, teaches in the English and Journalism departments at Concordia University, and is the editorial lead at Feeld. Previously, Mlotek was the deputy editor of SSENSE, the style editor of MTV News, the editor of The Hairpin, and the publisher of WORN Fashion Journal. View titles by Haley Mlotek

I was married on a cold day in December. Thirteen months later my husband moved out. We decided to separate in November after agreeing to spend the holidays with our families. We told just a few friends, thinking maybe this was temporary. But the weeks between were a problem. After over a decade celebrating the anniversary of the spring night he kissed me—a hotel elevator, a high school trip—now there was the date that marked the night he kissed me in his mother’s living room, where we exchanged rings and signed papers. We had been together for thirteen years, lived together for five, and now, were we supposed to celebrate the one year we barely managed to stay married? Well—we made dinner reservations. Not knowing what to do or where to look, we talked about what we had done that day, our jobs. I tried to be careful but couldn’t help making some reference to our situation, so he would know the strangeness was not lost on me. “What was your favorite part of being married?” I asked, smiling to shield the was. He talked about our wedding, our move to a new city, and then he asked me the same question.“ Being a family,” I said, and cried, but only a little.

We flew home. We saw our families, and we fought. We were cat-sitting for a friend and my husband spent his nights elsewhere. The cats had recently been kittens and were not yet adjusted to their adult sizes. They ran and played as though they might not knock over water glasses or pull out electrical cords. They were cute and they kept me awake all night. In the mornings my husband—my handsome husband, I sometimes thought when I saw him, even after we decided to separate, because he was, still, both—would come home and feed them, and they would immediately fall asleep. God, I hated those cats.

On the first day of the New Year we flew back to our apartment. By the third day I was living there alone.

Every generation of North American is now alive at a moment when they have access to what is usually called “no‑fault” divorce, the legal dissolution of marriage that does not require a reason beyond choice. Those who have lived long enough to know the difference understand the significance of this freedom; those who will never know the difference have inherited a profound question of what divorce should be, who it is for, and why the institution of marriage maintains its power.

I have looked for guidance everywhere but real life. Through fiction and film, through gossip and conversation, through research about the past and speculation about the future, and most of all through work—always working, always writing. I have always preferred reading to reality. In reading, there’s the possibility for more than just what’s on the page, or the screen, or coming through the other end of the phone. In turning over what happened, the facts are just details, significance just interpretation. This is evasive, and better still, very effective. I want you to ask if I’ve read Anna Karenina. I do not want you to ask what I would do for love.

There are some incidents that seem to matter most and that becomes the story. Sometimes there’s risk or danger, tears or blood. A story about broken plates, the screen in the window, the sound of his voice. But what happened after? That is what I want to know.

When they both decided they had had enough, I want to ask: And then what? Did they go to bed, and if so, did they sleep in the same bed? What was it like the next morning—did they make coffee, or say goodbye before leaving for work? I prefer to see myself as audience, watching as though it didn’t happen to me. When remembering, I can see that in my story the worst happened twice, maybe three times. Then it was over.

I would like to observe my feelings more than feel them. This is, I know, the bad kind of romance: believing there’s meaning to be found if you could get the details right. Only some details matter, but I hold them all with the same weight. Every marriage requires that a couple agree on at least one part of the story: the ending.

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.