Growing up, Haley Mlotek knew all about unsuccessful marriages: not only were her parents and grandparents divorced but her mother was also a certified divorce mediator. None of this made Mlotek's own divorce less incomprehensible, and she's dogged in her search for clarifying light in her invigoratingly intelligent first book, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce.
When she was 16, Mlotek met the man who would become her husband; they were together until they were 29, having been married for that final year. (Because Mlotek and her husband wanted to live and work in New York City, their visas required them to marry, reports the author, who is a Canadian citizen.) No Fault finds Mlotek frequently stepping outside her story to look at divorce as an evolving social phenomenon--something once viewed as a sign of moral failing that became commonplace in the U.S. by the 1970s, when marriage counselors "began to wonder if they should be helping people adapt to divorced life rather than pressuring them to stay married." Mlotek also probes books, films, and books turned films--Heartburn and Eat Pray Love among them--that consider divorce or employ it as a storytelling device.
Mlotek reserves a more or less uninterrupted flow of personal ruminations for the memoir's last hundred-odd pages: she recounts the painful period after her husband moved out and her forays into the thorny dating scene. Pertinaciously researched and ceaselessly curious, if structurally a little scattershot, No Fault is a sui generis memoir of heartbreak and that nebulous, nameless period right afterward. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer