No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce [Hardcover]

One of NPR’s 2025 “Books We Love”

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 rel³±