The Divorce Memoir I Carried Around With Me For a Month

‘No Fault' author Haley Mlotek on gossiping about yourself, divorce movies, and her “memoir of romance and divorce”

More from Hung Up this week: Watching the Meghan Markle Netflix series, my favorite scene from The Traitors US this season, and a recap of the Oscars. And Peyton and I were guests on "MESS!”

Annette Bening in 20th Century Women, technically not a “divorce movie” but Haley Mlotek and I both agree that it is one. Photo: Screenshot.

Devoted Hung Up readers will recall that I love divorced women, and hope to become one someday.¹ That’s part of why I devoured Haley Mlotek’s new book, “No Fault,” a memoir about her own separation. The specifics of the breakup are left vague in the text, but the contours of the separation feel achingly specific. Intercut between the moments of memoir is research about divorce historically and today, primary sources about the political, civil, and emotional ways one undoes a marriage.

“No Fault” is wonderful, with sections that singe and linger. The text feels like a thoughtful wandering: what conclusions can we ever really draw about finding harmony with someone and then losing it? “It took me a really long time before I felt like I was narrowing it down into something that I understood and had a shape that I could see and a structure that I trusted,” Mlotek told me over the phone one recent afternoon. “A lot of the time was spent writing completely disconnected sections, and then being totally lost about how they spoke to each other. It was almost like the connective threads between each of the sections happened almost towards the end of finishing the manuscript itself.”

If you could only see my copy of “No Fault” now, how tattered it is, how much I’ve carried it around with me in the month that I read and re-read it! I took it to Mexico and to the movies and on several subway rides I knew would be too short for me to even have time to open it. I just wanted to have it at my fingertips. It’s at once disarmingly elucidating and totally complex. Is anyone an authority on marriage, or relationships, the most prismatic of endeavors? “It is not that divorce reveals a more elemental aspect to a person’s character—although it certainly can—but that it is the only way to find out who we are in those moments of pain, loss, and shame that come after standing up in front of the people you trust and love the most,” Mlotek writes near the end, “only to say later that you hadn’t known what you were doing.” I love a sentence like that: casual, but never cavalier, as mortifying as it is true.

I’ve been dying to talk about “No Fault” ever since Mlotek announced that she was writing it. Here, we discuss Waiting To Exhale, structuring a book like a screenplay, good sentences, and great gossip. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

There is a delicate opaqueness to this writing. I feel like I have some insight into your divorce from reading it, but also none at all.² Your writing mimics the prismatic nature of relationships, marriages, divorces. I wondered how conscious you were of that quality in “No Fault” as you were writing it?
It definitely was deliberate. I knew as I was writing it that there were certain things that I wanted to keep to myself, and also a lot of things that were not mine to share. I also think I lean towards opaqueness in general. I don’t know. The type of reading that I always love to do is when I find somebody puts so much attention into the details of a description, which doesn’t always mean that we need the details of what’s literally happening. It’s about what’s observable on the surface.

At what point in your divorce did you begin working on the book? I read somewhere that you started this as an essay first?
Pretty much immediately after I was going through my separation, I was starting to take notes. I wasn’t really thinking that it would be for an essay about divorce, or certainly not a book about divorce.

But I began it as an essay, and it was for c at n+1, my brilliant friend. She was the first person who said, “I think this is a book.” And I was like, No, no, no, no. I’m not writing a book about divorce. That’s crazy. Then I took it to a writer’s residency where the program director was Susan Orlean, who I’ve been a fan of for a million years. She also said, “I think you’re writing a book.” At that point I had to be like, Okay, these two brilliant women must know what they’re talking about. I have to listen to them.

But you know how sometimes when you’re working on a book review, or something that’s about a breakup, and you’re like, Oh, this sentence might come in handy or don’t forget this feeling that you’re having because maybe it’ll be relevant for a future piece of writing? I sort of thought that’s what I was doing [as I was taking notes]. It wasn’t until I was pretty deep in the process of the essay that I would go back and look at those notes and start bringing them back into the draft itself. I remember being really surprised by how much writing I had done. I thought of it as just scribbling in my notes app, but there’s actually a lot of words in there.

haleymlotek

A post shared by @haleymlotek

Are you normally a journaler or a diarist?
No, I really have to force myself to do it if I’m going to do it at all. I’ve definitely done “The Artist’s Way”³ and “morning pages,” and I do love those in theory. I love the idea that it’s supposed to train you to think about writing as something that gives you energy rather than depletes you of it.

But I do find it very exhausting, to be honest. I also have a tendency to write to be read. The closest I get to having a regular journal process is just frequently taking notes on what I’m thinking about, whether or not I know that’s for a specific piece, or for this book, or if it’s just something that comes to me and I’m like maybe one day this will come in handy. But yeah, it’s a lot of just leaving breadcrumbs for myself so I don’t get lost if I ever want to come back to it.

Oh god, how divine. “Leaving little breadcrumbs to myself,” I love that. Have you read Carrie Fisher’s memoir The Princess Diarist? It’s half memoir-half journals from when she was making Star Wars and having an affair with Harrison Ford.
Oh my God, no, but I love Carrie Fisher’s writing

It’s so good. I read it when I was 22 and finishing a weird situationship.⁴ There’s a line that I think about all the time from a dairy entry. She’s basically irritated by her own dramatics: “I talk about myself behind my back … I waste myself.”⁵ That’s my tendency! Sometimes I talk about myself in ways that, as I’m saying it, I’m not even sure if I totally buy my own reflections. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who is prone to spilling their guts like that. “No Fault” is so personal, but it’s also very considered.
That’s so funny because I definitely think I do that! I actually have a word for it. Sometimes when I’m talking to my friends and I have news for them, I’ll tell them that I have “personal gossip.” I’m going to start gossiping about myself as a person as though I’m not there, literally “I hooked up with the guy, and that’s my personal gossip.”

I think of myself as somebody who’s very oversharing, over dramatic, talking way too much, literally wrote a memoir about her divorce. My friends are the ones who are like, No, we have to drag that information out of you. Maybe it just seems like a lot to me because I can hear my own thoughts and I forget that other people aren’t doing that all the time, luckily for them.

I do like that a theme of this book is really standing up for gossip. Sometimes you can learn more about yourself through what you’ve decided to share with other people.
Yes, absolutely.

Your grandmother was divorced, your parents were divorced, and your mom worked with divorced couples for a living. I’d like to ask about the idea that divorce is your family’s inheritance. Something I’ve thought a lot about in the past year is that even as a child, I thought I knew exactly why my parents got divorced. The older I get, the less certain I am. Did you go through any version of that, of thinking about how much of these divorces that shaped you were their experiences versus your own?
Oh, definitely. Maybe it’s just that when we’re kids, or teenagers, we're a little bit more certain in our perspectives and when we get older, we’re less so. But absolutely same: The older I get, the less sure I am about anything, even having a reason that I could find, or that there’s one person who could definitively tell me what exactly happened. I definitely think the farther away I get from those events, the more determined they feel, where it’s like they were always fated to happen, but then I'm less certain about why they happened at all, which is a very confusing tension there.

That’s exactly it. I want to talk about sentences now. I was struck by how much attention you give to sentences, or even just phrases. Several times in the book you share specific lines that really stuck with you as you researched marriage and divorce. It seems like an editor's instinct, but also a very close reader’s. Has that always been your experience as a reader and as a writer?
I just love a good sentence. I feel very connected to the sentence level of things. As a freelance writer, I’ve been really lucky to be able to work for some bigger institutionalized publications and they have often a very intense house tone. When I was working on those, my goal would be to just get one perfect sentence in there where I’m like, If I can just get one sentence that sounds like me, I will be so happy and they can have all the other sentences, but I just need that one.

I find that when I’m writing essays, I often always know which sentence I want to organize the rest of the writing around, like what I want it all to lead up to. With reading, I have a real tendency to retain in my memory the feeling of coming across a sentence that really resonates. That helps me almost memorize it and just recall it so frequently. Writing a book was very different. Obviously, you need so many sentences to write a book. I couldn’t just have the one.

This is a blend of memoir and research, and both parts are pretty rigorous. Some sections feel like echoes of each other. The conclusions aren’t packaged neatly or obviously. How did you go about arranging both the research and the personal?
That was really very much influenced by the process of writing itself. When I started, I had this very well-defined sense of exactly what I wanted the book to be, and I had this outline of every chapter and how the research was going to speak to this anecdote, which was going to speak to this cultural reference, and it would all be so clean and organized.

As soon as I started really writing, that all fell apart and it never made any sense. I had to completely rethink that. Two things really influenced me in terms of the more fragmented parts of the book. One of them was coming across Deborah Levy’s writing as I was finishing the first draft of the manuscript. She has such a beautiful way of encapsulating an entire scene in a very short page. I just loved that feeling. That was something I really wanted to bring into my work, if I could.

And then I just started reading more about writing screenplays. I love movies, and I have some friends who are filmmakers. One of them had recommended that I think about it less as “fragments” and more as jump cuts, in the way you can follow a movie that quickly switches from scene to scene. It was very freeing for me to think about bringing that quality to the book as well.

So that explains why I love it so much. Of course I want to talk about movies. There is this one sentence that I underlined and starred maybe four different times. You wrote, “I like movies, not because they’re like life, but because they aren’t.” So many people don’t understand that! Were you always a movie kid? How has your relationship to movie going and movie watching changed over the years?
Oh yes, always [a movie lover]. When I wrote that, that was something that I’ve learned after many years of thinking that all movies are basically documentaries. When I was a kid, I was very shy. I was very quiet. And I basically thought that movies and books were how-to guides, like learning how to be a person was something that I could do by looking to them. And obviously that is not the case, and something very important to unlearn as an adult. But it’s more that it’s that feeling of what they reflect for both the people who are making it and for the audience who are watching it. It’s not necessarily that it’s a literal depiction of an actual experience that people can recognize because it’s so precise, but that it has the contours of their own emotional experience that they can apply onto the narrative that’s in front of them.

Totally, a movie’s nonlinear depiction can be so much closer to how an emotion felt in the moment. Before we finish, I do want to ask about Waiting to Exhale, a movie I really love.⁶ There’s a scene from that movie that I remember my mom used to explain my parents’ divorce to me. I believe you wrote that it was your favorite divorce movie that starts with a car set on fire?
Yes, and there are actually a few of those. The other one I was thinking of was 20th Century Women. Not technically a divorce movie, but I’ll keep it in there because I make the rules.

Waiting to Exhale is a really fascinating document of the way divorce, relationships, families, motherhood, and friendship were all seen in the nineties. That’s a great example to me of how it captured something that was very honest, even if it wasn’t necessarily very realistic.

Something that I’m intrigued by in that movie is how much it feels like getting divorced lets you graduate into a community of women. That’s true of First Wives Club too, of course. But Eat Pray Love or Under the Tuscan Sun — those are more solo journeys.
Totally, yes. I think that’s very telling of the decades that they came out of. Not that the nineties were so much better necessarily, but the montages in Waiting to Exhale and First Wives Club are all about solidarity and the friendships. In the 2000s, you get these very personal and individualized heroes’ journeys. I think that is absolutely a reflection of a kind of cultural shift that led to this era, I’m sure, of influencers and girl bosses, or however else you want to put it. Just this idea that your life story should be something that’s yours alone to profit off of.

That’s a perfect segue into the model of that kind of 2000s divorce writing, Elizabeth Gilbert. I loved reading your consideration of what we misremember about that entire moment. I think when I read her “Eat Pray Love” book “Committed”⁷ all those years ago, I wanted it to be more like “No Fault.”
I definitely read basically all the Elizabeth Gilbert books, certainly all the nonfiction ones. I find her so fascinating. I know she has another book coming out, and she’s really a testament to how long life can be. She’s had so many incredible eras and really wrote her way through so many of them. And I’m sure there's so much that we don’t know, but she did really set a kind of standard that I think we still exist under. She was very, I think, open and honest about being financially motivated to write “Eat Pray Love,” that it needed to be the type of thing that subsidized her life. I remember I read “Eat Pray Love” when it came out when I was a teenager. There was no way I was in the head space to understand it.

I reread it for this book, and I write about it in “No Fault” a little bit. I was really touched by her new introduction where she has so much compassion for her younger self. There are so many things in that book that are very fair to call cringey, at the very least. It was really hardening to see her as a writer be able to be like, yes, that’s what I wrote then. I feel differently about it now, but this book exists as an object in the world. It’s not mine anymore. It’s yours.

I think I wrote this in “No Fault,” and if I didn’t, I definitely had it in my notes. My issue with “Committed” was that it definitely felt like it was trying to convince the reader of something in a way that I was like, I don’t think that's what readers are for. I don’t think we can tell you that you made the right decision or that this is the path that you should be going on. And I think “Eat Pray Love” probably resonated with so many because it was a little bit more open. It felt like that conclusion of her falling in love at the end was almost accidental, whereas “Committed,” it was the opposite. She’d fallen into this funny situation and needed to marry to get out of it.

I have one very important final question: Are you watching the newest season of Love Is Blind, because I read that you’re a fan of that series. And if you are, what do you think of it?
Despite myself, I am. I think every time I watch a new season of Love is Blind, I’m like why am I doing this? It actually feels like I’m participating in something evil. No, I don’t know. It is, at this point, practically a compulsion just to see it through. And the funny thing is, I’ve watched all the seasons and I would never be able to tell you anybody’s names! If you try to get me to match faces to names, I can never do it. I get so invested in everybody’s stories and so curious, I think, to see the way to see how every season there’s this big emphasis on is love blind, which is just really a euphemism for Can we Stockholm Syndrome these people and to giving us the outcome that we want? And the answer is always yes, but the way they do it is really fascinating.

I do legitimately think there is a really interesting relationship between what the show wants the people on it to do and how the people internalize it for themselves. That I think that’s what I’m actually watching for. You know, I think a lot of people who go on that type of show feel probably like they’ve got a handle on it or they know what they’re doing it for. And no judgment, there are many good reasons to go on a dating show. There’s something about the language they all learn to speak to each other that’s kind of fascinating. In much the same way that marriage does, it sort of forces its own conventions on individual people.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. You can buy “No Fault” here. And you should!

If I Divorced Oscar Isaac I Would Also Want To Remarry Oscar Isaac

New Most Divorced Man Bout To Drop

A Leo is Always on the Cusp of Divorce When You Really Think About It

1. I am not only a child of divorce, but a student of divorce, and I have watched enough movies to consider myself an aspiring divorcée.

2. I liked this moment from Haley’s Interview piece with Jia Tolentino, who she is friends with:

3. And speaking of “The Artist’s Way” …

4. Loved this note from Grammarly btw … if only!

5. The passage in question:

6. From August 2023: “I grew up on Waiting To Exhale. There is nothing more wonderful and luxurious to me than a divorced woman, a woman rebuilding her life, a woman choosing a new future.”

7. Elizabeth Gilbert’s follow-up to her blockbuster memoir “Eat Pray Love,” wherein she researches the history of marriage as she approaches her own.