Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf know that we can’t fully portray life on the page. She tried chronology and language to capture the subjectivity of human existence. Some writers may deal with this challenge by completely rethinking the conventional narrative. In her debut, Nothing wrong: Romance and Divorce MemoirsHaley Mlotek shows how this central incompatibility creates a useful provocation: relying on stories is a universal metaphor for a person’s romantic experience, even one’s life. "The horror of my life's story is to know why my life needs to be the perfect attention to a story," she wrote in the ending chapter.

That's to say Nothing wrong It's not a love story, or even a life story, because it refuses to tell stories in the first place. It is neither a chronicle nor a testimony nor a confession. Instead, it is about the meaning of divorce and through the personal and cultural investigation of the extension of marriage, which emphasizes rejection of solutions. Compared with other famous works, it is named "Divorce Memoir" Fragments and Lyz Lenz This American ex-wifeMlotek's book reveals little details about her marriage or disbandment. She seems to realize that some readers may feel frustrated by leaning, or find that their avoidance may feel frustrated. "Because I don't tell stories, everyone thinks I have a secret," she explained, "why her friend seeks a divorce." She did not provide it. "As a result, my friends and I are the same, and we don't know why my marriage ended," she wrote, knowing that I will never. ”

Nothing wrongThe sharp ambivalence requires readers to re-adjust their expectations for a memoir written by a woman who chose to divorce rather than a man. Those looking for catharsis or muddy treatments that apply to their heartache and existence will only find a certain answer – no one can fully know their own mind. Mlotek claims that this is the real work of the memoir: illuminating the extent to which we blind ourselves.

Read: Severe views on marriage and admonishment to leave marriage

if Nothing wrongThe ambiguity of the readers continues, and it provides us with enough biographical details to understand its context. Mlotek was 10 years old when she began to advise her mother (divorce mediator) to leave her father. However, her parents remained in the quarrel alliance until they were 19 years old. In the following years, Mlotek worked in his mother's basement office and became a peripheral witness to the next broken marriage. “I began to see our home as a place where other families collapsed,” she wrote. Ultimately, Mlotek’s “the whole world is divorced.” "All the adults I know have divorced, or should have been divorced," she explained. Perhaps naturally, Mlotek has some doubts about marriage, as she has seen, an institution The terms for millions of lives (creating templates) are just proving themselves again and again to be an inappropriate arrangement.

Nevertheless, Mlotek fell in love with the man she later married, when she was in high school. Mlotek and her boyfriend built a life together when their friends slid into the contacts, and their commitments were mostly unwavering over 12 years. They ended up marrying because doing so allowed them to move from Canada to New York. After a painful and difficult year, they were separated and divorced separately.

During the subsequent lost period, Mlotek was not only a participant in the divorce, but also a theorist among them. Grief inspired a wide range of inquiries to understand its cultural significance and reverb. She has watched recent and decades-old movies that focus on divorced or divorced women, including An unmarried woman and Marriage Story. She asked about the movie's remarriage plot, e.g. The Philadelphia Story and Paradise ticketthe couple divorced and then returned to each other. She read novels about marriage in crisis: Jenny Offill Speculation DepartmentJamaica's Jincaid Watch now. She repeatedly returns to Phyllis Rose's important 1983 study, Parallel Life: Five Victorian Marriageswhich brings motivation to readers of memoirs. "We are desperate to get information about other people's lives because we want to know how to live," Ross wrote.

However, this cumulative effect of literary and cultural exploration is only prescriptive (regardless of the information of some films themselves). Instead, these works form traces of historical and imaginary personalities, full of desire and restraint. Most people and characters MLOTEK encounters married (or trying to be) and many of them are not satisfied with the promise. In some of these cases, marriage is likely to express what critic Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism”, in which one desires to confuse them, or as Mlotek has done. As mentioned, "things that hurt" was chosen. These book registrations are not collectively prosecuting conventional marriages, not entirely; instead, they often illuminate our misplaced confidence in an institution’s ability to promote the well-being of the masses.

Of course, couples have long been seeking customization and even revolutionizing marriage bonds. Mlotek examined Audre Lorde's attempt to redefine marriage and family when he married his friend Edwin Rollins in 1962. Lorde is a lesbian, and Rollins is a gay man who is determined to shape their relationships based on their ideals. The experiment was relatively short (they divorced in 1970). In microscopic terms, Lorde and Rollins promulgated what Mlotek called “ambiguity” in “decisions, relationships and works” in “ambiguity”, and they tried to “build something far more than already familiar ”. Their failed attempts seem to show that such efforts are futile. But I suspect that this institution can only really change through the durability of people like Lord and Rollins until the different ways of getting happy marriage turn from abnormality to real possibility.

Read: Marriage that changes literary history

Divorce has also changed over the years. In the early days of her memoir, Mlotek introduced his nominal terminology, Nothing wrongthis refers to a divorce without a specified blame. California was the first state to legalize a no-fault divorce in 1969. New York was the last in 2010. As Mlotek suggests, the legal name gives couples, especially women, important freedom: this means leaving their spouse “no reason is needed”, for example, abuse, for example, or infidelity- Beyond the choice. "But, having freedom brings contradictions. To end a marriage, one must weigh the desire for competition and determine what they are willing to tolerate and the grief they can bear.

Nothing wrong is a provocative term, a loose but useful metaphor for organizing, with a clear description inherent in memoirs that strictly resist the distributive blame. The plot often revolves around mistakes. Without it, readers are abandoned as shades of grey. Sometimes I hope the book has more attention to this semester, as Mlotek considers more fully its potential resonance in the archives she studies. But maybe I am just responding to my deepest, textual and life preferences to address the logical narrative thread. title Nothing wrong Still set the tone for Mlotek's gentle exploration to understand the obscureness of human intimacy. That's enough.

After admitting my tendencies, I will put the cards on the table. I have been treating love stories as a prescription and determining that my marriage plot will stabilize my emotions unul. In 2010, this trend drove me to marry my college boyfriend. Just 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 a classmate. Our son was born in 2021. I think you could call it another love story, but I prefer the statement Mlotek offers in her conclusion: It's just "what happened", I changed my life by admitting my feelings, It's a change in my life. t Ignore and make different choices.