In today’s newsletter, Molly Fischer on how divorce, in itself, can change a person. Plus:

Who Gets to Define Divorce?

The battle for custody of a contested institution.

The dissatisfactions of heterosexual marriages have been the focus of many recent memoirs by women chronicling the dissolution of their relationships. On the whole, these books “present divorce as liberation and marriage as oppressive,” Molly Fischer writes in this week’s issue. “No Fault,” by the Canadian writer Haley Mlotek, stands out for its measured, equivocal tone. Mlotek and her husband separated after thirteen years together, with none of the complicating factors that often accompany separations—no kids, no entangled finances, no debts, no pets, no blame, no malice. “The whole experience took place under circumstances so neatly constrained as to resemble a thought experiment,” Fischer notes. What does divorce, in itself, do to a person?

Mlotek’s title presumably comes from no-fault divorce laws, which did away with the idea that divorce required proof of wrongdoing, such as abuse or adultery. Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault law as the governor of California, in 1969. New York, the last state to follow suit, did so in 2010. What goes on between two people in a relationship is widely considered a private matter, but recently certain right-leaning voices have come out against the ethos of no-fault: Vice-President J. D. Vance has said that no-fault is “one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace.” Perhaps, Fischer argues in her review of Mlotek’s book, this is because privacy, and particularly the privacy that exists within marriage, has served as a legal basis for rights—to contraception and other forms of sexual freedom—that are under attack. “The idea that your marriage is your own (secular, individual) business is the kind of thing that bedevils religious conservatives,” Fischer writes. This makes “privacy and its place in love feel idealistic and almost subversive.”

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For more on modern divorce, read Leslie Jamison’s essay on the end of her marriage, and Naomi Fry’s interview with Laura Wasser, the divorce lawyer to the stars.