Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf understood that we cannot depict life on the page precisely the way we experience it; she experimented with chronology and language to capture the subjectivity of human existence. Some writers might meet this challenge by rethinking conventional narrative altogether. In her debut memoir, No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, Haley Mlotek shows how this central incompatibility yields a useful provocation: There are hazards in relying on stories as the prevailing metaphor for one’s romantic experiences, and even one’s life in total. “The terror of wondering what story my life would be was a perfect distraction from wondering why my life needed to be a story,” she writes in a concluding chapter.

This is all to say that No Fault is not a love story, or even a life story, because it refuses to tell a story in the first place. It is neither chronicle, nor testimony, nor confession; rather, it is a personal and cultural inquiry into the significance of divorce, and by extension marriage, that emphatically rejects resolution. Compared with other recent works branded as “divorce memoirs,” such as Leslie Jamison’s Splinters and Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife, Mlotek’s book reveals few details about her marriage or its dissolution. She seems conscious of the possibility that some readers might be frustrated with her obliqueness, or find her evasive. “Because I don’t tell stories,” she explains, “everyone thinks I have secrets.” Her friends seek reasons for her divorce; she offers none. “As a result, my friends and I are alike in that none of us had any idea why my marriage ended,” she writes, before adding a parenthetical caveat: “We are different in that they think they can find the answer, and I know I never will.”

No Fault’s pointed ambivalence demands that readers recalibrate their expectations for a memoir written by a woman who chose divorce over a man. Those searching for catharsis or an applicable remedy to their own heartaches and existential muddles will find only one definitive answer—that no person can ever fully know her own mind. This, Mlotek claims, is the memoirist’s true work: to articulate the extent to which we are obscure to ourselves.

[Read: A grim view of marriage—and an exhortation to leave it]

If No Fault’s ambiguity holds readers at arm’s length, it supplies us with sufficient biographical detail to understand its context. Mlotek is 10 years old when she begins advising her mother, a divorce mediator, to leave her father. Nevertheless, her parents remain in their quarrelsome union until she is 19. In the intervening years, Mlotek works in her mother’s basement office and becomes a peripheral witness to one broken marriage after the next. “I began to think of our home as the place where other families fell apart,” she writes. Eventually, it seems as if Mlotek’s “entire world was divorce.” “All the adults I knew were getting divorced,” she explains, “or should have been.” Perhaps naturally, Mlotek develops some suspicion of marriage, an institution, as she sees it, that sets the terms for millions of lives—imposes its template—only to prove itself an ill-fitting arrangement time and time again.

Nonetheless, Mlotek is in high school when she falls in love with the man she will later marry. As their friends glide in and out of liaisons, Mlotek and her boyfriend build a life together, their commitment mostly steadfast over the course of 12 years. They eventually marry because doing so enables them to relocate from Canada to New York. After one painful, fractious year as husband and wife, they separate and then divorce.

In the disorienting period that follows, Mlotek is not merely a participant in divorce, but also a theorist of it; grief inspires a wide-ranging query into its cultural significance and reverberations. She watches films, both recent and decades-old, that focus on divorced or divorcing women, including An Unmarried Woman and Marriage Story. She interrogates the remarriage plots of films such as The Philadelphia Story and Ticket to Paradise, in which couples divorce and then return to each other. She reads novels about marriages in crisis: Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, Jamaica Kincaid’s See Now Then. She repeatedly returns to Phyllis Rose’s 1983 critical study, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, which posits a motivation for readers of memoir. “We are desperate for information about how other people live,” Rose writes, “because we want to know how to live ourselves.”

And yet, the cumulative effect of this literary and cultural exploration is anything but prescriptive (whatever the messages of some of the films themselves). On the contrary, these works form a trail of historical and imagined personalities, full of desires and disinclinations that misalign. Most of the people and characters Mlotek encounters are married (or tried to be), and many of them are unhappy in that commitment. In several of these cases, marriage might well be an expression of what the critic Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism,” in which a person desires what stymies them, or as Mlotek puts it, chooses “what hurts.” These readings register not as a collective indictment of conventional marriage—not exactly; instead they illuminate, often queasily, our misplaced confidence in one institution’s capacity to facilitate the happiness of the masses.

Of course, couples have long sought to customize, even revolutionize, the marital bond. Mlotek examines Audre Lorde’s attempt to redefine matrimony and family when she married her friend Edwin Rollins in 1962. Lorde had been living openly as a lesbian, Rollins was a gay man, and they were determined to shape their relationship according to their ideals. The experiment was relatively short-lived (they divorced in 1970). In microcosmic terms, Lorde and Rollins enact what Mlotek describes as the “ambiguity” of the “decisions and relationships and writings” of people who tried to “build something more than what was already familiar.” Their failed attempt might seem to suggest that such endeavors are fruitless. But I suspect that this institution can only truly transform through the persistence of people like Lorde and Rollins, until different ways of being happily married evolve from anomalies to real possibilities.

[Read: A marriage that changed literary history]

Divorce, too, has changed over the years. Early in her memoir, Mlotek introduces its titular term, no fault, which refers to a divorce obtained without the designation of blame. California was the first state to legalize no-fault divorce in 1969; New York was the last, in 2010. As Mlotek suggests, the legal designation bestows a crucial liberty upon couples, particularly women: It means that leaving one’s spouse “does not require a reason”—abuse, for example, or infidelity—“beyond choice.” But with freedom can come ambivalence. To end a marriage, a person must weigh competing desires—and determine what they are willing to tolerate, and what they can bear to grieve.

No fault is a provocative term, one that serves as a loose, yet useful, organizing metaphor for a memoir that rigorously resists the clear delineations inherent to apportioned blame. Story plots so often cohere around fault; without it, readers are abandoned to shades of gray. At times I wished the book paid more attention to this term, for Mlotek to more fully consider its potential resonances in the archives she has studied. But perhaps I was simply responding to my own deep-seated predilections, in text and in life, for a logical narrative thread. The title No Fault still sets the tone for Mlotek’s tender exploration into the obscurities of human intimacy. That is enough.

Having admitted my own predispositions, I will lay my cards on the table. I have been guilty of treating love stories as prescriptions, certain that a marriage plot of my own would steady my emotional unruliness. In 2010, this tendency propelled me to marry my college boyfriend; barely two months later, I fell in love with a classmate and realized that I had made a terrible mistake. My own no-fault divorce was finalized in the fall of 2011. Nearly three years later, I married my classmate; our son was born in 2021. I suppose you could call this another love story, but I prefer the formulation Mlotek offers in her conclusion: It’s merely “what happened after” I shifted the course of my life, by acknowledging a feeling I couldn’t ignore and making a different choice.

New Yorkers, despite our reputation for being cantankerous, agree on many things—primarily things we dislike: rats; subway crime; our mayor, Eric Adams.

Adams’s polling was dismal well before he was indicted on federal corruption charges. A 2023 Quinnipiac University poll put his approval rating at 28 percent—the lowest result for a mayor since Quinnipiac began polling New York voters, in 1996. Adams got negative marks on every measure: the city’s handling of homelessness, education, crime, migrants, and the budget. But perhaps most notable were respondents’ views of Adams, the man. More than half of New Yorkers felt that he had poor leadership qualities, didn’t understand people like them, and wasn’t honest or trustworthy. (Less scientific, but equally telling: For the past couple of years, a meme has circulated of a “Club Promoter” Halloween-costume pack featuring a photo of Mayor Adams and the words Includes: Nothing helpful.)

Mayor Adams’s low popularity had as much to do with the chaos and swirl of corruption around his administration as it did with residents’ dissatisfaction with his management of the city. Much like our president, Adams favored putting friends and relatives in positions of power. He installed one friend as chancellor of education and made another his senior adviser on public safety and recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. After the charges against Adams were announced, a number of his associates were indicted too. Many others have since resigned. (Adams pleaded not guilty and maintained that the case was politically motivated.)

Reading the Southern District’s indictment was, for many New Yorkers, simply confirmation of what we’d long suspected: Our mayor was an arrogant egoist using his position to enhance his and his cronies’ lifestyle. It was also embarrassing. Adams’s charges—for conspiracy, bribery, wire fraud, and solicitation of illegal campaign contributions from foreign businesspeople—center on allegations that he did real-estate favors for the Turkish government in return for free travel and perks on Turkish Airlines. I can’t help but feel that a city as great as this one deserves, at the very least, corruption more sophisticated and ambitious than Adams’s alleged attempts to score flight upgrades.

[Read: What Trump is getting from Eric Adams]

Maybe the crimes go deeper. But now we may never know, because Donald Trump’s administration has ordered prosecutors to dismiss the charges against Adams. Emil Bove III, a Trump appointee in the Justice Department, has argued that the charges were politically motivated and the dismissal necessary because the prosecution interfered with the mayor’s ability to govern. It was, he wrote, a threat to “public safety, national security, and related federal immigration initiatives and policies.”

To anyone who believes Bove’s claims that the investigation into Adams was a “weaponization” of the federal government: I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Immigration initiatives is the key phrase here—Adams has met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and in December hosted Trump’s border czar at Gracie Mansion. After that meeting, Adams said he might consider an executive order to “unravel” immigration rules that he sees as restrictive. The impression is that he has pledged to cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda in return for his protection.

The Trump administration’s meddling is a perversion of the principles of the Department of Justice, and at least six prosecutors in New York and Washington have resigned in protest. But more than that, it is an insult to the intelligence and common sense of New Yorkers. Today, a judge will hear from Justice Department lawyers and decide whether to grant the administration’s request. If the case is dropped, the mayor’s constituents will be deprived of the opportunity to see him held accountable, and they will be saddled with a mayor who is beholden not to the will of the people but to Trump.

Trump won 30 percent of New York City voters. His national “mandate” is debatable, but in the city it doesn’t exist, in part because so many people reject Trump’s dangerous belief that a president is above the law. Now the Trump administration is telling New Yorkers to apply that logic not just to their president but to their mayor as well.

[Read: Eric Adams’s totally predictable MAGA turn]

One thing the Trump administration gets right is that Adams’s legal troubles are a distraction from doing his job. Back in 2023, when a number of his personal aides had their phones seized, Adams bailed on an important meeting with the White House and congressional leaders about New York’s migrant population. Last week, Kathryn Wylde, from the business advocacy group Partnership for New York, said that the controversies had “derailed” the execution of many policy goals.

After the indictment became public, nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers said Adams should resign. A true public servant would do that, but Adams is a mayor for our times, and seems to care less about serving the public than about serving himself. One of the protesting officials described succinctly in her own resignation letter what she saw as a “quid pro quo”: “an improper offer of immigration enforcement assistance in exchange for a dismissal of his case.” (Bove and Adams denied any improper quid pro quo.) Adams has not just agreed to be Trump’s puppet: He went to the administration and brought his own strings.

Regardless of what the judge decides, there is someone who can do something: Governor Kathy Hochul, who could—and should—just fire the mayor already.

To many non–New Yorkers, this scandal might seem an abstraction—the way the Los Angeles fires might feel if you’re in Nebraska, or how a Texas school shooting might feel when you’re all the way in Maine. But what’s happening in New York should matter to all Americans, because it is yet another example of the president imposing his own agenda over the law and public consensus. He pardoned the January 6 rioters, renamed Mount McKinley, turned an astonishing proportion of the government over to Elon Musk—and now there’s Eric Adams. In each instance, Trump is sending a message: I’m in charge, whether you like it or not