Episode 105: Weird Era feat. Haley Mlotek

About Haley Mlotek: HALEY MLOTEK is a writer, editor, and organizer whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Nation, T Magazine, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Hazlitt, and n+1, among others. She is a founding member of the Freelance Solidarity Project, a distinct division for digital media workers within the National Writers Union, and teaches in the English and Journalism departments at Concordia University. Previously, Mlotek was the deputy editor of SSENSE, the style editor of MTV News, the editor of The Hairpin, and the publisher of WORN Fashion Journal. About No Fault: When Haley Mlotek was ten years old, she told her mother to leave her father. Divorce was all around her. Her mother ran a mediation and marriage counseling practice out of Mlotek’s childhood home, and Mlotek spent her preteen years answering the phones and typing out parenting plans 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 everything she thought she understood about divorce. Deftly combining her personal story with wry, searching social and literary exploration, No Fault is a brilliant account of 21st century divorce—its remarkably common yet seemingly singular impact, 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 and towards an unknown future. Brilliant, funny, and unflinchingly honest, No Fault is a kaleidoscopic look at marriage, secrets, ambitions, and what it truly means to love and live with uncertainty, betrayal, and hope.