Mainstream publishers have released a spate of divorce memoirs this year, among them Haley Mlotek’s No-Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce. As an advocate for abolishing our nation’s unconstitutional no-fault divorce laws, the title intrigued me. But the book was nearly unreadable. Even nicely crafted sentences don’t lead anywhere.
It’s called a memoir, but it’s not even a story; the author admits that. It’s not self-help either — there are no remedies. Snippets of what amount to little more than diary entries haphazardly veer off to random musings about books, movies, and television shows. Some sections aim to examine marriage and divorce through historical and cultural lenses, but that approach disappoints too, evidenced by the hodgepodge of cherry-picked facts.
So why even bother reviewing a book so lacking in merit? Because corporate media are fawning over it, pushing sales, and perpetuating the serious myth that divorce doesn’t matter. At the start of his papacy, Pope Francis said “marriage and the family are in crisis.” More than a decade later, the situation has worsened. And family scholars agree.
The author purports to examine why she got married and divorced a year later. From her periodic breadcrumbs, we learn that she and her husband had been together for 13 years and lived together for five. Both had divorced parents. Halfway through the book, she confesses she has no idea why her marriage ended “and I know I never will.”
She Never Had a Marriage to Begin with
But it’s not much of a mystery — she never had a marriage to begin with, thus divorce was all but inevitable. Indeed, the author sensed this, writing: “The statistics of divorce are more like a zombie movie that terrifies with its promise of conformity, of inevitability, overwhelming our minds with the helpless knowledge of the force that’s coming for us.” Still, she’s unable, or unwilling, to dig deep enough to uncover why.
She and her husband apparently tied the knot to deal with visa problems. They never had joint property, joint debts, or joint bank accounts. In one of her rambles, she points out that divorce requires spouses to become opponents, i.e. plaintiffs and defendants, “a break that requires what was one become unquestionably two.” But her analogy fails. What was never a unit can’t be broken apart.
She can’t recognize “anything like a family” between them, she says, but that’s because they never made the necessary real commitments. No mention of the prospect of children either. It’s irksome she makes readers wait until page 247 to learn she had an open marriage, doomed from the get-go.
No-Fault Divorce
The author resents filling out expense forms at her attorney’s office but gets that part right. Under no-fault divorce, splitting up families has become just that — a business transaction. But her observation that divorce courts aren’t “the best forum to dictate right and wrong” underscores her fundamental misunderstanding about family courts and no-fault divorce, which legally removed any concept of right and wrong from the process and, with it, fairness and due process. She characterizes no-fault as a system based on “choice,” but fails to acknowledge that most lawsuits are unilateral, with one spouse forcing their choice — and subjective opinion — on the other that the marriage is over.
Moreover, the intergenerational transmission of divorce is well-established. And Mlotek is an appropriate stand-in for children of divorce. Her mother divorced twice, as did the grandmother she adored, who recommended divorce highly to her granddaughter. Worse, as a child she helped in her mother’s divorce mediation business — answering calls, interacting with divorced couples, etc. In high school, she was depressed, a classic symptom exhibited by children of divorce. The cloud of divorce even hung over her wedding — she describes watching her dad and his new girlfriend, and the sets of divorced parents avoiding each other. No wonder the author confesses, “I have a broken television set where my brain used to be.”
Feminist Bent
To the extent the book has a viewpoint about anything, it’s with a decidedly liberal, feminist bent. The author criticizes conservatives and extols women like Esther Perel (the sex therapist who questions monogamy), Constance Ahrons (creator of the good divorce myth), and Adrienne Rich (the bisexual poet whose husband committed suicide soon after she left him). If the author had been on a true quest for knowledge, however, she couldn’t escape respected authorities on marriage and divorce like Judith Wallerstein, John Gottman, Brad Wilcox, and many more. Among all the memoirs she read she wouldn’t have missed those who stand up for their marriage like Harrison Scott Key’s How To Stay Married. But those views don’t fit her narrative. She also ignores voluminous research on the negative consequences of divorce, particularly to children. But perhaps that examination would have forced examination into the culpability of her family and herself.
The most glaring omission is any mention whatsoever of where marriage got its start. Had she never heard the Biblical story that billions of Christians and Jews throughout history have adhered to? Instead, she suggests marriage and permanency are relatively recent inventions, “appear[ing] as a mirage in a desert.”
Predictably, the book contains thinly veiled references to the patriarchy too. Mlotek bristles when called a “wife,” hurls a jab at a “white man and his wife,” and warns of the risks if women leave the workforce for marriage and domesticity.
The book ends with the author concluding that her initial inquiry into why she married and divorced didn’t really matter, the only relevant question is “what happened after?” So what did happen? Did she receive what she’d been raised to expect — the “something better on the other side of bad. . . if not total happiness at least peace?”
She reveals precious little and she seems as aimless as when her book started. However, an internet search reveals she’s editor of a new adult magazine, with a companion dating app, that explores gender, sexuality, and desire. For someone who admits she doesn’t understand why she got divorced, I would recommend that rather than going “outside of existing blueprints” to find love, she actually try one of them — unlike whatever she’s doing, they work.
Jesus Christ is King
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