No Fault
A Memoir of Romance and Divorce
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No Fault
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Narrated by:
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Haley Mlotek
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Written by:
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Haley Mlotek
About this listen
“Enigmatic, opalescent, so precise.”—Jia Tolentino
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.
©2025 Haley Mlotek (P)2025 Penguin AudioWhat the critics say
“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
“I'm haunted by the sophistication of Haley Mlotek's insights and the tenderness with which they are delivered. No Fault is devastating because it is as full of pain as it is love. There is no other book on divorce or marriage—or romance—like this one.”—Charlotte Shane, author of An Honest Woman
“Singular, dazzling and wry, No Fault weaves the personal and political in an elegant exploration of divorce’s cultural position, and of what it means to take that step yourself—moving onto ground both historically well-trodden, and unimaginably alien. There is such clarity and tenderness set out in the pristine sentences of this book.”—Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure