The New Yorker:

The battle for custody of a contested institution.

By Molly Fischer

Last summer, a poll by the Survey Center on American Life produced a striking statistic. Breaking down the electorate by marital status and then by gender, the survey found that, in an already polarized Presidential race, one divide stretched wider than the others: divorced men were fourteen percentage points more likely than divorced women to say that they supported Donald Trump. (Indeed, in this breakdown, divorced men were more likely than any other segment of the population to support Trump.) The finding resonated with Gallup research showing that the partisan divide between divorced men and divorced women was higher in recent years than it had been in two decades, with men skewing Republican. Marriage is well established as a predictor of political behavior—divorce, these figures suggested, could be a similarly profound and potentially radicalizing event, one with the power to alter its participants’ lives and their fundamental understanding of the world.

Haley Mlotek, a Canadian writer, ended a marriage in her late twenties. In her new book, “No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce,” Mlotek writes that her experience “hadn’t defined my feelings, but it had changed the shape of them in a way I couldn’t have predicted and probably would never recover from.” As that language indicates, her treatment of divorce is measured, a bit opaque, and resolutely abstract—far afield from the battle of the sexes that characterized last year’s election. Mlotek, now in her late thirties, came of age in an era of widely available and culturally normalized divorce. Her mother worked as a divorce mediator from an office in the family basement; her grandmother, twice divorced, would start stories with “my husbands,” a plural that struck the young Mlotek as glamorous. Mlotek’s parents separated when she was nineteen—but, long before that, she writes, “my entire world was divorce.” She grew up overhearing her parents fight about money and sensing the strain in their relationship. When she was ten, according to family lore, she proposed that her mother get a divorce. “Being able to end a marriage was a fact as obvious as all the other luxuries I was lucky enough to take for granted, like breakfast every morning and being left alone to read for as long as I wanted,” she writes.

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