No Fault
By
Haley Mlotek
Read by
Haley Mlotek
Release:
02/18/2025
Runtime:
7h 36m
Quantity:
Haley Mlotek’s No Fault is a book about life escaping the story built to contain it. A history of heterosexual love, marriage, and divorce that’s suspicious of clean answers, a winsome and poignant recounting of her own romantic formation and deformation, No Fault is a cool and bracing corrective against those many over-certain stories of marriage’s dissolution that still dominate the form. Mlotek, as always, is a master of elegant destabilization; her sentences are enigmatic, opalescent, so precise as to feel like long-lost aphorisms. We’re lucky to have her on this subject—a writer who can work in the gap between the known and the unknown, the intimate and the public, the way our lives are always forged in material context and the unreachable particularities of the human heart.
Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror
A Vogue & Vulture Best Book of the Year (So Far)
“Enigmatic, opalescent, so precise.” —Jia Tolentino
“An investigation, an invocation, a mood.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
“A personal accounting of heartache. . . . Mlotek’s writing reaches toward — and actually meets — poetry.” —Alissa Bennett, The New York Times Book Review
“A cool appraisal of millennial divorce.” —Emma Alpern, Vulture
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.
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025: Vogue, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, W, Bustle, Lit Hub, The Millions
“Enigmatic, opalescent, so precise.” —Jia Tolentino
“An investigation, an invocation, a mood.” —Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
“A personal accounting of heartache. . . . Mlotek’s writing reaches toward — and actually meets — poetry.” —Alissa Bennett, The New York Times Book Review
“A cool appraisal of millennial divorce.” —Emma Alpern, Vulture
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.
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025: Vogue, Vulture, Harper’s Bazaar, W, Bustle, Lit Hub, The Millions
Release:
2025-02-18
Runtime:
7h 36m
Format:
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9798217016112
Praise