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.)

An exploration of divorce through a variety of lenses. Even before she went through her own divorce, Mlotek's "entire world was divorce"; her grandparents and parents both divorced, and her mother was a professional divorce mediator. In her full-length debut, she looks at both cultural history and popular literature and film to make sense of divorcing her husband after one year of marriage and 12 years together. She follows the rise of both love as a basis for marriage and the acceptance of legal divorce as the means of disentangling from a spouse, noting along the way how the institutions of both marriage and divorce influenced movements for women's equality. As divorce became more commonplace, it infiltrated literature and film; Mlotek dedicates a large stretch of her text to cataloging and dissecting her favorites of these artistic touchpoints, infused as they are by insights, ideals, and instructions that the author "sought out in narratives first and therapy second." Attention to and scrutiny of the author's own marriage and divorce provide both elements to these somewhat jittery summaries, as well as to an accounting of various romantic escapades following her separation. While she hints at a number of things that could be said about her relationship and its dissolution, she fails to fully say any of them. Mlotek has a flair for the profoundly and poetically stated, but her style wanders, injected with dramatic segues and self-conscious reflections that muddy the narrative arc rather than illuminate it. In the end, readers are left holding too many disparate threads--some interesting, others provocative, several linguistically elegant--that together create a sort of temperamental wrestling with the function of divorce. An uncertain and stifled stab at understanding the changing significance of marriage and divorce. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.