No Fault

An intimate and candid account of one of the most romantic and revolutionary of relationships, divorce--from a brilliant, award-winning young writer When Haley Mlotek was ten years old, she told her mother to leave her father. Divorce was all around her. Her mother ran a mediation and marriage counseling practice out of Mlotek’s childhood home, and she spent her preteen years answering the phones and typing out parenting plans 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 everything she thought she understood about divorce. Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honesty, <No Fault <is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it truly means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.

Auteur

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, The 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, Haley was the deputy editor of SSENSE, the style editor of MTV News, the editor of The Hairpin, and the publisher of WORN Fashion Journal.

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

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.