No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce

Mlotek debuts with a frank combination of personal and social history that examines both her own divorce and shifting attitudes about the practice. Though Mlotek and her husband dated for 13 years before their wedding, they divorced after just one year of marriage. The experience led Mlotek to reexamine her lifelong comfort with the idea of divorce: her parents and grandparents got divorced; her mother worked as a certified divorce mediator; and when the author was 10, she casually suggested her mother leave her father. As Mlotek reflects on the signs that spelled danger for her relationship—she envied her peers, for example, who used postcollege breakups to help clarify their desires—she launches an inquiry into the history of divorce, tracking legal shifts and divorce rates across the 20th century while analyzing the divorces of such pop culture figures as Elizabeth Gilbert. What emerges is a shrewd testament to personal agency and self-definition, with Mlotek concluding that divorce “is the only way to find out who we are in those moments of pain, loss, and shame” after “standing up in front of the people you love and trust the most, only to say later that you hadn’t known what you were doing.” This raw and reflective account stands out in the crowded field of divorce memoirs. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)