Divorce literature is having a moment. Memoirs and novels such as Liars, the discourse-inducing All Fours, This American Ex-Wife and You Could Make This Place Beautiful have taken over book clubs and inspired incisive critiques of the genre as a whole. Featured heavily in the conversation is Toronto author Haley Mlotek’s new book, No Fault, which she calls a “memoir of romance and divorce.” Now, Mlotek is transporting the discourse off the page with the launch of a brand new kind of event series: The Divorced Women’s Film Festival.
No Fault is about divorce, covering not just Mlotek’s own, but also the history of divorce, her familial experience with divorce (her mother is a divorce mediator who has been twice married and divorced and her grandmother was divorced as well), and divorce films as a whole sub-genre. At just 288 pages, Mlotek’s book is gulpable; I crushed the final 80 pages in a single sitting, pinned to the cushions, utterly moved.
Originally conceived as a recommendation for divorce humour piece several months after her separation, Mlotek had toyed with writing about divorce as early as 2014. This would have chronicled, “growing up as the daughter of a divorce mediator. That was well before I got married.” Mlotek worked on the book in some shape or form over a 10-year period. As it evolved, it became a mix of both memoir and non-fiction.
“Over the years, it waxed and waned between the personal and the professional. There was never a time when it was entirely one or the other,” Mlotek says.
No Fault transcends its own conceit, ultimately revealing the mechanisms of how we tell stories to others as well as ourselves. It’s a book grounded in truth, though Mlotek is less interested in airing out the dirty laundry of her marriage than dissecting everything else about divorce, as a concept, as a political tool, as a cultural fascination and as an event for which there is a stark before and after.
Much of the book (Mlotek estimates around 15,000 of the total 70,000) words were written in the immediate months following her divorce. “It stayed very present in the manuscript because I think it did the work of conveying just how discombobulated I was in that first year,” she recalls.
That being said, Mlotek hesitates in attributing total catharsis to her writing. “Any piece of writing that you publish stops being yours once it’s finished. It’s hard to actually categorize it as some sort of epiphany or self-reflection, because it’s not something that exists inside you anymore, it’s something you’ve given away,” she says.
Mlotek’s memoir is unique because she isn’t giving herself away completely to her audience — there’s a restraint that makes the prose, even at its most deeply melancholy, fluid without being slippery. Mlotek is a reliable narrator who knows better than to spill every secret.
“I did start working in media in an era where the economy was trading the worst thing that ever happened to you for 50 bucks, so I’m very skeptical of disclosure. I think a lot of the time, disclosure and confession can be a way of avoiding honesty. When you really overload people with information, it makes it very difficult to get to the truth of what somebody is saying,” she says. “I definitely respond very strongly to writers that are quite simple, quite direct. I wanted to bring in that influence as much as possible, as well.”
No Fault works so well because Mlotek refuses to tell the story of her divorce as just that, a story. She recognizes how easy it is to believe a convenient narrative, but it’s never so simple as A led to B led to C led to divorce. The most obvious question of “What happened?” is also the least interesting.
“That’s obviously the danger that people warn against when they talk about getting too attached to a narrative or telling yourself a story, because it can override the possibility that you’re wrong or that you might see things differently one day.”
Mlotek references 46 films in the book, most of which feature women grappling with either getting divorced or being divorced. There’s the more commercial Eat, Pray, Love, but also Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman. Given how prominently movies features in No Fault, it was only natural for Mlotek to host a Divorced Women’s Film Festival. It started as a joke she made to some programmer friends working at the Metrograph in New York, but they took her seriously.
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“They were like, ‘We can make that real. Don’t forget about us when the book comes out.” Starting in New York, the Divorced Women’s Film Festival has had installments in Montreal and is coming to Toronto from April 12-13 at the Paradise Theatre.
“I always wanted there to be something that my book provided that wasn’t literally about selling the book, was more about sharing something from it in a way that was just easy and fun and inviting,” Mlotek says. Not only is Mlotek able to screen old favourite like An Unmarried Woman, but she’s included films that didn’t make it into the book like Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy. “Being able to kind of have an addendum to a published manuscript is very nice.”
The screenings have already proved rewarding. “I have really loved getting people to come talk about their personal experiences,” Mlotek says, as she recounts viewers coming up to her after An Unmarried Woman in Montreal to share that their parents lived in the exact building Jill Clayburgh’s character lives in in the film. Before the screening of The First Wives Club in New York, Ari Greenberg, who plays Bette Midler’s son, reached out.
“That was amazing to have him tell the audience his story about being a 12 year-old working with Bette Midler,” she says.
Mlotek, who now lives in Montreal after many years in New York, cites that her love of film began here in Toronto. She names the theatres like the old Madison Theatre (now Hot Docs) and Varsity Cinema that she still visits today. Bay Street Video, Queen Video and the now-closed Videoflicks by her grandmother’s apartment were places where she could browse and discover. It’s the latter that holds fonder memories. In No Fault, Mlotek’s grandmother is a warm and benevolent matriarch, the kind of relative that you have no choice but to idolize.
“My grandmother really loved movies and books and art and theatre and dance. I definitely feel lucky that I got the chance as a kid to have that as a model for what adult life could be,” she says. “She always took us to the movies, and so I would associate that with doing something I liked with somebody I loved.”
