NO FAULT

An exploration of divorce through a variety of lenses.

Even before she went through her own divorce, Mlotek’s “entire world was divorce”; her grandparents and parents both divorced, and her mother was a professional divorce mediator. In her full-length debut, she looks at both cultural history and popular literature and film to make sense of divorcing her husband after one year of marriage and 12 years together. She follows the rise of both love as a basis for marriage and the acceptance of legal divorce as the means of disentangling from a spouse, noting along the way how the institutions of both marriage and divorce influenced movements for women’s equality. As divorce became more commonplace, it infiltrated literature and film; Mlotek dedicates a large stretch of her text to cataloging and dissecting her favorites of these artistic touchpoints, infused as they are by insights, ideals, and instructions that the author “sought out in narratives first and therapy second.” Attention to and scrutiny of the author’s own marriage and divorce provide both elements to these somewhat jittery summaries, as well as to an accounting of various romantic escapades following her separation. While she hints at a number of things that could be said about her relationship and its dissolution, she fails to fully say any of them. Mlotek has a flair for the profoundly and poetically stated, but her style wanders, injected with dramatic segues and self-conscious reflections that muddy the narrative arc rather than illuminate it. In the end, readers are left holding too many disparate threads—some interesting, others provocative, several linguistically elegant—that together create a sort of temperamental wrestling with the function of divorce.

An uncertain and stifled stab at understanding the changing significance of marriage and divorce.