Sometimes after saying “I do,” you realize you don’t. For Haley Mlotek, this moment came after twelve years of being together, and eleven months of marriage. “The night I told him I wanted it to be over is the night I think of as our last, for reasons that are obvious and also my own,” she writes in No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, published this week by Viking. “We were vicious. We were liquid. When we were done, I put one hand around his neck and let my fingers touch his ear, my forehead on his shoulder and my other hand on my heart, which had slowed so much I was light-headed. I said his name again and again. I can still hear the way I said it that night.” The next day, she went shopping for jeans. “I didn’t buy anything, and I don’t remember how I got home.”

Part memoir, part survey of modern divorce, No Fault is an artful tour through the books, films, and socio-cultural history that explore how marriages end—with a particular interest in the titular legal grounds for marriage dissolution in which no proven wrongdoing is necessary. (Beginning half a century ago, no-fault divorce was ratified state by state; New York, in 2010, became the last to make it law.) For Mlotek, the ways people part are as meaningful as how they come together, and the book is devastating and funny in equal measure, calling on a wealth of research and cultural resources to consider how we choose to live over time, both together and apart. She loves a remarriage comedy, a witty observation or wink, but it is the depth of Mlotek’s capacity for the mysterious and extant ways we make our lives that most captured this reader.

“Divorce stories want climax, resolution. Life wants nothing from you,” Mlotek writes, “in the sense that you are just another person in the world, your fortunes the result of your own judgments and your fates the result of your own interpretation, but there is no narrative that can compare to the recklessness of an ordinary day, of an average life lived.” She describes swimming out into the ocean, past the shoreline’s cresting waves, towards a point where the power that surrounds defines one’s entire existence. “You cannot ask for a break, for solace, for recognition. You can barely ask to keep your head above water. There’s only one choice. You can be in or out. Such forces tend to punish hesitation more harshly than anything else.”

Mlotek and I talked about divorce as familial inheritance, how no-fault changed things, her upcoming Divorced Women’s Film Festival, dating after divorce, and more.

I wonder if you could start by saying a bit about the formal structure of the book—which is a collection of vignettes that moves across genres like personal writing, sociopolitical history, and cultural criticism.

It was very much inspired by the writers that I love and, in many cases, cite in the book. I think the type of writing that I've always responded to most has that feeling of being a little bit subtle, a little bit opaque. I love the experience of reading a sentence from a writer where they either use the “I” or talk about themselves directly, or where they reveal that they've come to some sort of insight or knowledge through personal experience.

I'm thinking specifically of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, and so much of her cultural criticism and work in general. I always have this feeling that she must have realized what it is she knows about people, whether or not she's literally writing about herself. Another example that's very present in the book is Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives, which is, of course, a brilliant historical work of group biography. She has these asides about breakups and loss and romantic obsession that always make me go, "How did you learn this? What's that story?"

When I was almost done with the first draft of the manuscript, I found Deborah Levy for the first time. I came across her memoirs and her approach to vignettes. That approach to writing affirmed to me that I was on the right track, that there were so many wonderful examples of writers I respected doing the same thing.

The book is interested, as Rose is, in looking at other lives and trying to understand how people make decisions about how to live. (You write “A how-to is an overvalued directive. What I wanted was a 'how-did': How did they live? ‘We are desperate for information about how other people live because we want to know how to live ourselves,’ Rose writes, ‘yet we are taught to see this desire as an illegitimate form of prying.’") Starting with your own mother and grandmother, you write about their divorces (your mother’s from your father, the glamor of your grandmother’s twice-divorced status), your mother's work as a divorce mediator, and divorce as a kind of familial inheritance.

Something that I often joke about, that’s actually very serious, is this sense that divorces are a family business for us, defined in two ways. The experience of divorce is very central to how my family sees itself and the stories that we tell about our family unit. But it’s also been, quite literally, the source of our financial stability. It was the profession that supported us. And then when I was working on the book and I interviewed my grandmother, I was a little surprised that when I asked her very direct questions about her experience being divorced, she almost immediately went to the more financial, material practicalities of the experience.

She talked about supporting herself, working, and the way that economic anxiety influenced her experience of being a divorcée. It's not that I didn’t expect to talk about those factors, but it was illuminating that she went there before any of the other more emotional parts of the experience. It showed just how present those concerns always are for people in those precarious situations, but it also represented yet another form of family inheritance, because I was like, Oh, right. We've all always expressed our emotions through conversations about work, about money. That is where we locate a lot of our emotional turmoil or stability.

You make clear throughout the book that while marriage may be imbued with many considerations—like, say, love—and our individual and collective desires or fantasies, the decision to get married has also always been, and is, political and material.

Love marriages have overtaken our historical understanding of how the relationship has functioned. There's an overwhelming sense that love is this pure emotion that can't risk being ruined by anything as horrible as money. Right?

I understand that impulse, and to a certain extent, I agree with it. I also agree that there are good reasons to disentangle the economics of marriage and partnership from romance, because so much of it was rooted in ideas of who was dependent on the family wage, as it was once known. The implication was that men needed a certain salary in order to support their wives and children, and that some people would be denied the privileges of marriage by being excluded from it as a legal right. Those are all good reasons to keep the economic and material sides of domestic partnerships out of love. On the other hand, when I think about the couples and marriages that I respect and admire most, I see people who are really up-front and honest about how the economic and material realities of their lives are shaped by their marriage and, in turn, shape their marriage.

I'm thinking about the people I know who have started families and are deep in the logistics of how to support children, how to divide labor in the house, and who talk about that as a fact of life rather than a battle to be won. I often talk to my friends who are parents about the idea that fairness isn't always equal. Something that's fair doesn't need to be split right down the line.

I think it's worth considering why we’re resistant to combining these two realities—that we need love and closeness and intimacy and comfort, as well as shelter and financial stability—and what strength could actually be brought into our lives by just admitting that they're not that different.

I’d like to invite you to talk a bit about the Audre Lorde section of your book. I think it really illuminates something about how the choices we make in structuring our intimate and familial lives are personal, specific, fluid. What did Lorde's story mean to you?

I was already thinking of Lorde as a brilliant critic and interpreter of people, movements, and experiences. But it wasn't until I started reading Alexis De Veaux's biography that I thought much about her marriage. I knew she had two kids with her husband, and I had thought about her life as an out, queer woman and her relationships with other women, like Frances Clayton and Gloria Joseph. But it hadn't really occurred to me to write about her as a divorcée. I believe that when De Veaux wrote her biography, she was one of the only people who had ever interviewed Ed Rollins, Lorde's husband. These books approached her marriage and divorce with so much compassion and insight, and they really enriched my understanding of Lorde's life and experiences.

It occurred to me that she was the perfect figure to talk specifically about the way heterosexual marriage intersects with queer life. I greatly benefited from research that looks closer at the history of queer people building intimate partnerships or having families while being denied the right to marry, or how they found ways to live under those oppressive conditions and still have love in their lives.

I wonder if you want to say anything more about the memoirists you were thinking about when writing, or the memoir genre itself.

There’s an endless list, but maybe one of my most reread books is Heidi Julavits's The Folded Clock: A Diary. I just think she's so funny. I love all of her writing, but that memoir and her essays especially have this perfect tone of being genuinely laugh-out-loud funny while remaining deeply felt, very honest, very true. I loved her approach to writing about marriage and divorce and raising children. It became a book I’d open whenever I felt like I had forgotten how to write. There was something about her voice that made me feel like I knew how to think.

I remember a line from that book, indelibly seared into my twenty-something brain at the time: “Men want a relationship, but women expect a world.”

That's such a good entry.

Gendered or not—and she meant it to be gendered, of course—some go in expecting an entire world.

As soon as I read that, I never stopped seeing it.

You are clearly a lover of the movies. Stanley Cavell's study of the “comedy of remarriage” is one central point of engagement, but there are many references to film throughout the book—An Unmarried Woman (1978) and Heartburn (1986) are two important ones for you. Tell me a bit about your relationship to movies, and about the film series you’ve programmed in tandem with your book’s release.

I think there's something about film as a medium that lets you really see the overarching sentiment of mainstream movies and the independent, underground favorites of an era. They often speak to changes that are still unfolding in culture, in a way that you can literally watch on screen.

There's the fun aesthetic sense of that with An Unmarried Woman. Part of what I love about that film is seeing downtown New York in that period. I love the clothes. I love the scenes in the art galleries and the SoHo lofts, though we can only imagine what Instagram direct-to-consumer brand headquarters they've been converted to today. That part is fun, but there's also this sense, I think, that you're watching a cultural moment in transition. The film was actually changing the lives of its audiences. There's this really wonderful relationship between the people who made the movie, who must have related to its premise enough to turn it into a story, and then the audiences who recognized themselves in what they were watching, or maybe realized something was possible because they saw it on the screen.

If you look up Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), which isn’t one of my favorites for multiple reasons, but is important, versus Marriage Story (2019), they're worlds apart in what they take for granted about how a man [getting divorced] would behave. That's not to say that they represent linear progress or that one of them is more politically righteous than the other. It's just to say that the filmmakers' choices are critical documents of the cultures they come out of.

I'm so excited for the series at Metrograph (screening from Friday, February 21st, through Sunday, February 23rd). When I was writing the book, I made the joke that I felt like I was programming a Divorced Women's Film Festival, and then it became, like every other joke I’ve made, very serious. I was lucky enough to have worked with Metrograph in the past. I have chosen a very small assortment of movies to be played over a weekend. I really could have programmed this over a year if left unchecked, because there are so many great films. But I tried to narrow it down to the ones that have a lot of significance in the book, and others that were important to my family and my childhood—movies that I just think are kind of underrated divorce films. It's going to be a good time. Nothing but hits.

Looking forward to it. So, are you dating?

Why? Do you know somebody?

People love asking about my relationship status when they find out I'm writing a divorce book. I have one friend who's always saying it would be such a power move to release this book after I've been remarried, and that I should time my second marriage to its release.

À la Kate Bolick's Spinster. I remember some people were pissed that at the end, maybe in the afterword, she revealed her new serious relationship.

Exactly. And that's classic for so many memoirists who write about their divorce—to end it with their new love or their second marriage.

You explore the Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon.

When I started writing the book, and certainly when I got divorced, I was pretty young for a divorcée. It was definitely something that felt strange to talk about when I was dating for the first time, and I think people either thought it was a funny oddity or didn't think about it at all. Now, I am a much more reasonable age for being divorced, and it feels less significant. So yeah, it is funny to go on dates and have people ask me what I write about and to say “divorce.” How they react is often a really good indicator of a person's sense of humor. That part I like.

A good litmus test. Was there any research for the book that particularly surprised you, or changed your mind about something? And/or what are you thinking about now?

I think it would be so funny if my thing became that everybody should get and stay married, which I don't think. I have been thinking about fidelity a lot, and that's something I've been writing about a little—just the concept of faithfulness in romantic relationships.

Two books that were so important when I was writing were Marriage, a History by Stephanie Coontz, and then also Family Values by Melinda Cooper. With Coontz, it’s her point that there's never been a unified definition of what marriage is or should be, and what divorce is or should be—but that our nostalgia for this false past is more about the way we try to make sense of the present. With Cooper, her approach to thinking about the family and the way it's used to political ends was extremely important, and there were so many pieces of information in that book that really shocked me that I still reference. About how neoconservatism and neoliberalism have really worked in tandem to generate the idea of the family unit as the most idealized or most valuable [way of organizing a life] in our current political moment.

I would say, too, Jessie Bernard's book, The Future of Marriage, and her studies of how marriage impacts spouses differently based on gender were similarly influential. She wrote the sentence that I quote in the book, "The future does not hit everybody at the same time," which I think is beautiful and true. History and progress is not as linear as we would like it to be. ♦