Divorce, by the book: Authors Haley Mlotek and Scaachi Koul talk it out | Canada Voices

In their new memoirs, Canadian authors Scaachi Koul and Haley Mlotek consider the stories they’ve told themselves and others about their marriages, in two very different ways.

Mlotek’s No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, doesn’t get into many of the gory details of her own relationship. Instead, she uses art, literary letters, the history of divorce and conversations with her own friends to reflect on the difference between what marriage is supposed to mean and what it really does.

Koul’s book, Sucker Punch: Essays (out March 4), is much more forthright. She, too, puts marriage in a cultural context, examining the fault lines of race, gender, age and class that ran through her union. While very aware of these differences, Koul missed what else was going on in her marriage; by definition, a sucker punch is the hit you didn’t see coming.

Divorce lit’s big literary moment

Haley and Scaachi met up online at the Globe’s request, for a conversation about what it’s like to publish a book about your own divorce. The excerpt below has been edited for clarity and length. You can listen to a more in-depth version on The Globe’s daily podcast, The Decibel.

Scaachi Koul: Haley, when was the last time I talked to you? Ten years ago?

Haley Mlotek: I can’t believe that.

Koul: Well, in that time I got married and I got divorced, which I think you did too. What a weird coincidence!

Mlotek: We really found ourselves.

Koul: Have you given your book to your family to read? How are you doing the dissemination of your personal and public history?

Mlotek: I made a rule for myself early on in writing that I was going to let everybody who’s significantly mentioned in the book read it before it was published. And so I stuck to that. I reached out to everybody. I sent it to my family first, got in touch with a lot of people from the past – you know how it is.

Koul: Yeah, but I want you to tell me how it is! I mean, were you worried or were you just doing it as courtesy? Because I did the same thing [with] my first book, and that was courtesy. For this one, I was like, I don’t know if I feel like I need to do that again. Because this isn’t a journalistic venture in the traditional sense where I need to get someone’s comment. I’m writing about memory and feeling.

You can tell me I have facts incorrect, 100 per cent. But you can’t tell me that the way I felt about something was inaccurate. That’s not possible. So in the books that I write, they tend to traffic in feelings and not in fact, because I do fact elsewhere and I don’t really need to do it here.

Do you care what your ex-husband thinks about the book?

Mlotek: Yes, very much. What about you?

Scaachi: Nah.

[Both laugh uproariously.]

Mlotek: Did you read a lot of other divorce books when you were writing your divorce book?

Koul: A bunch of them started to come out while I was working on my divorce book. Splinters [by Leslie Jamison] came out, which I loved. I read Liars by Sarah Manguso, which is, I think, one of the best. I loved that book and a lot of people didn’t like it, and I kind of feel like people who didn’t like it are maybe not allowing themselves to hear a frequency that’s happening in the world.

Heather Havrilesky wrote a book called Forever Land – that’s a really nice book about her very functional marriage. I remember reading it and being like, oh, I’m not doing that at all. This is not at all what my relationship looks like or has ever looked like, and I don’t think they all have to look the same, but I am lacking something fundamental here because this book feels like fiction.

What did you read while you were writing?

Mlotek: I was reading so much because I love to do what I call “procrasti-research,” which is where I tell myself I’m working just by reading more and more. I read Deborah Levy for the first time when I was, I think, just finishing the first draft of the manuscript.

I don’t know if you feel this way, but we both came from this horrible New York media swamp where there’s a real scarcity mentality and this idea that there’s not enough for everybody. And so it’s very easy to get a kind of pain when you see somebody writing about a subject that you think is yours and to be like, oh no, there’s not gonna be enough left for me. And then Deborah Levy, and all the books that you mentioned as well, really had the opposite effect, where it was just like, no, this is a conversation. There are so many ways to talk about this. Yes, there is room for my book. Your book has a very specific structure to it. I’m curious if you knew at the beginning of writing it that you wanted to follow these stories.

Koul: No. I had written everything and then was just looking at it and felt like the structure didn’t quite connect. Then I was thinking about the way my mom talks in grief because so much of the book is about grief – not necessarily grief of loss, but the grief of how everything is hard, and that is exhausting and upsetting. She was always talking to the same Hindu deities, and I was starting to see all these parallels.

Then I’m looking at the deities that we were using on my wedding day. The structure kind of slotted in from there, of playing with Parvati, one of the main goddesses in Hinduism, who is known for her devotion to a man. Who is lauded for fighting to have him and to keep him and to protect him, who transmutes into all these different versions of femininity who become angrier and angrier and angrier until they destroy the universe to start over because nobody listened to her.

There’s also a framework of reincarnation in the book – about being stuck in a loop that is not feeding you. There’s always a way to break out of those loops. In Hinduism we agree there’s an eventual end, but it takes a long time to get there and you don’t know when you’re there. So do you want to keep doing this and being unhappy? Or do you want to do something else, and then maybe the end will be different?

You are a little more opaque than I am, I think, in your writing. I’m curious about why you want that and what that does for you, and what you think it does for the reader.

Mlotek: I think that’s my version of what you were describing earlier about relying on feelings instead of facts. It also is very much an attempt to reckon with the fact that I couldn’t tell you what literally happened. I don’t even know if I could tell you what colour shirt I was wearing. Things like that are outside of me, but the remains of the experience, the feelings as I remember them, as I’m trying to get down what I’m thinking onto the page, that’s more what I want my writing to do than to literally say why I got divorced.

Koul: What were you wearing when you separated?

Mlotek: I have no idea. I know it was winter. But because I was so broke working in media in New York, in order to pay for our last hour with the divorce lawyer I sold basically all my clothes. A lot of what had been my wardrobe from these years of working funny jobs at boutiques went to Beacon’s Closet. I think that influenced how I remember those details, because I don’t have those outfits. But maybe that’s for the best, you know: new wardrobe, new me.

Koul: Did you fill the wardrobe back out? Do you have clothes now?

Mlotek: I have clothes now. I am well dressed. I’m lucky. I got a bunch of stuff from my favourite store in Toronto, VSP, for the book tour, and that felt like a full-circle moment: I had sold all the stuff at a consignment store, and now I’m getting so many better things back.