With ‘No Fault,’ Haley Mlotek Has Written the Ne Plus Ultra of Divorce Memoirs

I also love Deborah Levy’s memoirs. I love the way she writes about work and family and friendship in the “after” time of being divorced. I definitely love to watch movies about divorce, and I’m always looking for more. The one I probably watch the most is An Unmarried Woman; it’s a movie, so it’s different, but it does have an almost diary-like feeling to it where we really are just watching how this main character spends her days after a divorce.

Is there anything you think we should stop asking divorced people, or maybe that we should start asking?

I always joke that when people tell me that they’re getting divorced, I always say, “I’m so sorry, and congratulations.” I think balancing the fact of the grief with some permission to celebrate is important for recent divorcees. My instinct was to say, we should probably stop asking divorced people or people who have just broken up “Why?” or “What happened?” But actually, I understand that sometimes it’s cathartic to really get it out there. I think maybe, like with everything, the best question to ask a recently divorced person is, “What would you like me to ask you about?”

You write about growing up in an environment where divorce was very much at the forefront. Do you think that affected your framing of your own divorce story, or do they feel like totally separate things?

I think it absolutely must have, but the truth is, I sometimes wonder if I would even know, because I have nothing to compare it to. We’re both children of divorce, and pretty much everyone I know has some divorce in their family, or now is divorced themselves, or has some other really close relationship to divorce, but mine is definitely a little different in how professionalized it is. Like, I always joke that divorce is truly our family business. But really, it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s my specific experience and what is sort of the collective culture, right?

I know it’s only been a few days since No Fault came out, but has that experience been lining up with what you had imagined? Does it feel different?

It’s weird. Like most big, precipice events, the anticipation doesn’t really prepare you for the actual time of living in it. When I was writing the book, I would tell myself, “Oh, well, I just have to get through this draft, I just have to get through this edit,” and now I catch myself being like, “Well, I just have to get through this phase of it being out in the world.” And then I remember that, actually, this phase lasts forever.