The Decibel - Scaachi Koul and Haley Mlotek are ready to talk about divorce

Episode Date: February 22, 2025

In this special weekend edition of The Decibel, two Canadian authors discuss their new memoirs on divorce. Scaachi Koul is a senior writer at Slate, and co-hosts the podcast Scamfluencers, as well as the Netflix show Follow This. Her second book is called Sucker Punch: Essays, and is a collection of essays about her divorce, among many other life-changing events.Haley Mlotek is a writer, editor, and organizer and has been published in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and many other places. Her first book is called No Fault: a Memoir of Romance and Divorce.Want more weekend editions of The Decibel? Email us at [e-mail] this Decibel survey: https://thedecibelsurvey.ca/ and share your thoughts for a chance to win $100 grocery gift cards.

Hi, it's Maynika, and this weekend we're bringing you another conversation. It's about something that isn't always easy to talk about — divorce. But thousands of Canadians experience it every year, and since most millennials are now in their 30s and 40s, they're starting to go through this more. Two new books by Canadian authors highlight their experiences of divorce as millennials. Sachie Cole is a senior writer at Slate. She co-hosts the podcast, Scamfluencers, and the Netflix show, Follow This.

Her second book, Sucker Punch, is out March 4th. It's a collection of essays about her divorce and other life-changing moments of the past few years. And Haley Melodic is a writer and editor. Her work has been published in the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Her first book is out now. It's called No Fault, a memoir of romance and divorce.

Earlier this week, Hiley and Sachi got together to talk about memory, the writing process, and what it's like to publish a book about your own divorce. Today, we're bringing you their conversation. ["The First Time I Met You"] I was gonna torture you and be like, let's introduce each other's. I'm not going to do

that. I could do it. I'm ready. Could you? I feel like very confident. Okay, let's hear it. Let's hear your elevator pitch for my book. Okay. We're here today with Satya Kuhl, whose new book Sucker Punch. Oh, wait, when is it out? March 4th. March 4th.

It is a collection of essays that takes as its cruts the fact of her time after a separation and a divorce, but looking more broadly at the influence it had on her ideas about family and friendships and her professional career. And it's extremely funny and very wise. Wow, that was so good. And I'm here with Haley Melodic, who wrote No Fault, which is out now. It is a memoir about her divorce, the beautiful and thoughtful meditation on it. It made me really sad and really hopeful and I loved it. Wow, sad and hopeful. That's nice, I think, on balance.

All the Canadian girlies are getting a divorce. Yeah, you know, obviously I've worked in fashion for a very long time, so I don't mind so much when people refer to it as a trend because I know that's just a pattern. But it's definitely true that there's like, there's something going on with divorce and the girlies in general. I mean, I feel like some of it is just age. I think there's like, like, this is just the mid range millennials are coming of age, turning 35, we're hitting it. Very painful, but we're all doing it.

And I mean, but it does feel like it's coming. I don't even feel like it's fully landed. I think you and I got divorced this kind of early. I was 31 when I got separated. I don't know how old you were. I was 29. It was right before I turned 30. Very young. Yes, quite young. Have you given your

book to your family to read? Like how are you doing the dissemination of your personal and public history? Yes, let's talk about that because I also want to hear what it's been like for you. Yes, I made a rule for myself very 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 rule. 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, you know how it is. Yeah, but I want you to tell me how. I mean, were you worried or were you just doing it as courtesy?

Because I did the same thing on my first book and that was courtesy. I was just being polite. And then for this one, I was like, I don't know if I feel like I need to do that again. I don't actually know that I need to give everybody the courtesy. I think everybody, certainly everybody's aware on my end. But I'm like, I'm curious if you were worried about anything. Definitely. I mean, worried about everything. Always. I felt like I didn't want people to encounter themselves in the book after it was just in the world. I at least wanted them to have some time with it alone. Nobody asked me to change anything and everybody was very like respectful even when we had

to have difficult conversations about you know the book itself. I don't know to me I had a friend who did say like he thought I was being a masochist by reaching out to all these people from my past because it is true I do really support and respect the decision not to reach out to people because it's often taken as an invitation to like maybe start a bigger conversation, which is it's not necessarily the time for that. But yeah, he said I was being a masochist and I was like, I think it's more masochistic to just publish the book and wait to see who's mad at me. You know, like I'd rather, I'd rather just ask. Yeah, you'd rather know. Yeah, I guess I that I respect. But yeah,

did anything happen when you reached out to everybody after your first book that made you go, I've learned from this, I'm not going to do it the second time? Or was it just more, you know, where you were at and what the book is about? Yeah, I mean, I write about it in the second book. So there's a lot about my second book that is sort of referencing the first. You don't need to have read the first one, but I mean it's source material and that that's the timeline of my life. And so you know there's a record if you want to look at it. And I think my second book is a lot about looking at a record and rethinking it and maybe realizing that I got it wrong even when I thought I was saying it correctly.

So, you know in my first book I write about this nebulous relationship I had with somebody that I was friends with when I was in college or in university, I forgot we're in Canada. I don't have to talk like that. But in my second book, I had to take a really close look at that essay again and what I was saying and what actually happened and what I was obfuscating for myself, what I was obfuscating for my ex-husband, what I was trying to tell an audience, what that story was actually saying to me. And so that process and getting back in touch

with somebody I had already written about and thinking about what I had written about them and how they felt about it, at the end of it, I was like, oh, I never need to do this again. 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 cannot tell me I am wrong about memory and feeling.

You can tell me I have facts incorrect, 100% timeline, all of that can be false and misconstrued and misinterpreted. 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. I mean, with my first book, I remember saying that it was easy to write about other people

because the asshole always had to be me. And that works. And this is not quite that. Well, it depends on who you ask. There are a plethora of Goodreads reviewers who will already tell you that they do not like this narrator, which is fair. I don't either. A lot of the time. That is their right. That is their right.

But it's less of that for sure. And I think because it's playing with narrative and what we tell ourselves and what we think is actually happening, I think I'm telling you a version of myself in the first half and in the second it changes. Yes, absolutely. And I mean, I would say that people should read both books because like if they haven't already read the first one to read them as a set because it is a really fascinating document of exactly what you're talking about, which is like memory and its limits, but also how writing sort of like codifies a type of experience in a way that we have to then deal with. Yeah. Haley, you had a lot of references in your book to different pieces of art and film, and I am not smart enough to have known all of them,

but I did like reading it. And it did feel like a kind of writing that I wish I could do, but it's just not my modality. Do you like watch those things and then figure out ways to feed them into the work or are you in the work and then you realize that you need to watch like a movie from 1935 and then tell realize that you need to watch like a movie from 1935?

And then tell me about it. Possibly both. But a funny thing that I have noticed, I think consciously just when I was writing the book, is that for me, going to the movies is a form of thinking. Where like as I'm sitting there in the same way, you know, they say that like walking or taking a shower is good for writing because it's just like basic lizard brain movements to distract you, which is so true. I feel like I wrote so much my book walking around. But I have that same feeling when I'm watching a movie. You know,

I'm concentrating on it, but I am thinking about what I recognize or what feels like about what I recognize or what feels like salient to whatever I'm thinking about at that moment. And so then with this book, it was sort of both like watching these movies or reading these books was a way of thinking about it, but then it became this feedback loop where, you know, I was seeking out the divorce movies, because I wanted to see if they said something and most of the time they would say something that I wasn't expecting and that would lead me down another research path. So yeah, all of the above.

What's your favorite divorce movie? I simply can't choose a favorite. They're all my favorites. Give me three. Yeah, what I was gonna say, if I have to choose one, I would just say an unmarried woman, only because I love it so much, but also because it's so hard to find on streaming. Oh yeah.

It's probably the divorce movie I've seen the most. And then I also love Losing Ground. And I love that Martin Scorsese said The Age of Innocence is the most violent movie he's ever made because I completely know what he means. He's a girly too. He's an ex-wife for sure. He's such an ex-wife. Oh my goodness. That's a whole other podcast. But then your book has a very specific structure to it, which I'm curious if you knew at the very beginning

of writing it that you wanted to follow these like stories. No. So I had written everything and then was just looking at it and felt like the structure didn't quite connect and I couldn't figure out why they weren't speaking to each other. And then I was thinking about, you know, the way my mom talks in grief and where she goes in grief because so much of the book is just about grief and not necessarily grief of loss, but just like the grief of how everything is hard and that is exhausting and upsetting. She was always talking to the same deities, the same Hindu deities. So then I was reading more about them and who they are and where they come from and what their point is, what the purpose of them is. And I was starting to

see all these parallels and then I'm looking at the things that I had at my wedding and the deities that we were using at my wedding day. And so then the structure kind of slotted in from there of playing both with Parvati, who's 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. So it started to fill in pretty easily from there. And then you know the every

section has a quote from somebody and so there are like a couple of things that I was reading while I was working on it like heartburn I referenced a couple of times and I remember reading it when I was younger. I'm going to spoil this 70-year-old book for everybody, but she stays with him up until the very, very, very end. She's pregnant, he cheats on her with her friend. This is autobiographical as far as I'm concerned, but she stays with him up until the last page. And then on the last page, he says something I can't remember now that bothers her and she throws a cake at him She leaves and that's what does it but it's like I Remember being young and reading it and being like wait

He cheats on her and I still have to read a hundred and seventy pages of this woman staying with him Like what is going on? And then when I read it as an adult I was like, oh Yeah, of course Absolutely, of course. Absolutely. Of course. And of course he just said one stupid thing and you lost your mind. That also feels right. And so like the structure, I felt like almost talked to a bit of what heartburn does, which is show you like, oh, you can go back again and again and again. No one will stop you. No one will stop you from going back. And you can do it until you are dead.

In fact, a lot of people do it like that. Yes. And I didn't want to. And so then there's also a framework of reincarnation in the book about being stuck in a loop that is not feeding you, but being stuck there. And there's always a way to break out of those loops. And Hinduism ends eventually. 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 wanna keep doing this and being unhappy? Or do you wanna maybe do something else and then, you know, maybe the end will be different. We'll be back in a minute. end will be different. Do you care what your ex-husband thinks about the book? Yes, very much.

You do care. Yes. What about you? Nah. Nah. Great. Great. We're doing fantastic.

Listen, you're a better person than me and that is established. Not by much, but like a little bit. It's more, you know, like, it's just a lot to think about. Yeah, yeah. When I'm confronted with it. I hope, I hope he's okay. I also do. I also hope for that.

I just don't care. Yeah. Yes. Yes, that's, that's very wise. That's the mature response. I'm hoping for the best. I'm prepared for the best. I'm prepared for nothing. And I anticipate even less than that. Did you read a lot of other divorce books when you were writing your divorce book?

A little bit. A bunch of them started to come out while I was working on my divorce book. So like Splinters came out, which I loved Splinters. I read that on vacation and like an hour and a half just sat there by the pool. I read Liars by Sarah Mangusso, which is like, 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, especially women. The prose is one thing, but if the ideas in that book don't really make any sense to you, I wonder if you are listening a bit.

But I love that book. But yeah, I read a lot of books. I think I told Heather this, but Heather Haverlewski wrote a book called Foreverland. I think it came out like 2020, I think, 2021. And that's a really nice book about her very functional marriage. Like it seems healthy. She's talking about nice, they seem to have a nice dynamic even when it's fraught. And I remember reading it and being like, Oh, I'm not doing that at all. But 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. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, sitting with it and thinking about it.

And then I emailed Heather the other day to tell her, because I was like, it was really that book. So like the divorce, it's interesting, the divorce books, I read them, and they all made sense to me, especially in hindsight. But if I read them when I was still married, I didn't initially like latch to it. It took a little while. What did you read while you were writing? I was reading so much because I love to do what I call procrastinology research, which is where I tell myself I'm working just by reading more and more. But I definitely remember I read Deborah Levy for the first time when I was like, I think just finishing the first draft of the manuscript. And that

was, you know, electrifying the way everything she does is where it was like, 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. Oh, yeah. And so it's, it's very easy to get like 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 any left for me. Yeah.

And then like Deborah Levy and all the books that you mentioned as well. And then, you know, so many others really had the opposite effect where it was just like, oh no, like this is a conversation. There are so many ways to talk about this. Yes, there is room for my book. And so I always go back to it for that reason. How long have you been divorced? Ten years, ten years. A long time.

It is a long time. Yeah. Wow. I thought it was less time than that. I've only been divorced for three years. I'm new. Yes, it's recent. How are you finding this first era of being a divorcee? Am I still in the first era? How long does that last? Maybe three years is a little long for the first phase,

but I do think it's, like the first phase is a surprising one. Oh yeah, the first two years is like every experience is novel and exciting and terrifying, the worst and the greatest time of your life. Exactly. Yes. I always refer to it as a divorce euphoria. New puberty.

Yes, completely. Like a second time. Discovering your body for the first time, learning about other people. Yes. for the first time learning about other people. Yes, and it is like, it's so amazing to think about people who do this in their like 50s or 60s, because, you know, obviously I don't love the idea of another hugely devastating foundational breakup coming again in my life, but you know,

statistically it's possible. Yeah, any minute now. Yeah, yeah, but you know statistically it's possible. Yeah Yeah, yeah But you know just the idea that's that sort of feeling of euphoria and renewal I like hear it from people who are a few decades older than me But yeah, I got divorced or yeah I got separated when I was 29 and then I think officially divorced when I was 31 or 32 And so I was kind of doing that at an era where a lot of my friends were committing. We were really at odds.

Yeah, it's funny to start, it's funny to be the divorced person when your friends are getting married. Oh my god. Did you ever feel, I, okay, I'm just telling to myself so I won't assume that you felt this way too. But I definitely had some feelings sometimes where I was like, I hope people don't think I'm contagious. They 100% treat you like you are contagious because you are. I'm mad.

Yes. Because you are, Hailey. It is actually a huge problem for married people to be around a divorced person because it does make them think about it. And if you are in a bad relationship, it doesn't take much. One interesting side effect about divorce that I love is that now I am the keeper of

everybody's marital problems because everybody will come and talk to you about it. And I have no particular expertise about most of it, but I'm happy to. I'm like, yeah, sure. What would your loser husband do now? Tell me about it. Like, oh, you hate him? Me too, whatever. We're ready at any point.

Yeah, I like that as a side effect. And the contagion stuff never offended me. I always thought it was funny, like from the beginning, because, and maybe you felt like that, and I think you did, because you also had like a weirdo hipster not their wedding you guys were like got married some living room you know yes hippie nonsense I'm very happy for you whatever whatever I I had I am beautiful right right no and I'm nothing is from any vaulted position I had

a four-day traditional wedding we're in the same boat, girl. It does not matter. So I mean, it's made me, I thought I didn't like care about anything before. Now I really don't care. Like you wrote in your book about like dating, I was gonna say posthumously, which isn't the right word, but it does feel like that a little bit, but like dating after a divorce. I'm curious how people in your circle will read that those sections. It's very interesting. You know, the feedback that I keep getting from my friends, and I'm sure, you know, frustrated critics, is that I'm often like very opaque

in the important details. So I definitely have gotten some people who are like confused about who I'm even referring to, which I love. Where I'm like, wow, I've done my job perfectly if you're not even sure which person this is. But it is definitely funny. And the example I always go back to, I don't know why this is like my pop cultural reference,

but you know the first season of Mad Men where there's that like divorcee that moves into the neighborhoods and everybody like can't be normal around her. I think like, I think just specifically being 29, having just moved to New York, having a new job, like constantly in these situations where I was introducing myself to people and that was like almost the fun fact about me.

It did perhaps like influence the way people responded to me or like got to know me. Do you introduce yourself as an ex-wife when you go on dates? You're like, hi, I'm Haley, I'm an ex-wife. I tell them all the time. That's like your first. It causes so much stress. Like the panic that I see in a lot of these men when you tell them, especially because I'm

young, right? So if I'm 33, 34, saying this to them and they're like 39 and have never been married or afraid of their own shadow and then you say that to them, they're like, oh, okay. I remember I told one guy, I told him I was divorced and he took my hand and he looked at me so solemn and he was like, but you're so beautiful. And I was like, yeah, yeah. It happens to us too. It's a scourge, Carlos. It's a scourge. But yeah, I think it's funny. So you're not, so you weren't attached to the label of wife, which I was not either, but do you like being an ex-wife?

Obsessed with it. I actually am starting to be like, should I do this three or four times? Like you either do it once and never again, or you have to do it six times. Yes, I think so as well. I'm trying to decide if I can financially afford to do this six times. I think I could, depending on who, you know, life is long. I didn't think that happened. Truly. Who knows what great love story is right around the corner.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right. I have to be less pessimistic. The planes are falling out of the sky, but maybe you're right. The planes are falling out of the sky, but maybe you're right. You are a little more opaque than I am, I think, in your writing, which is what you want. But I'm curious about why you want that and what that does for you and what you think it does for the reader. I think that's my version of what you were describing earlier about relying on feelings instead of facts. But I do, I think the type of writing that I've always loved to read and I respond very strongly to

is writing that feels like a scene, you know, where you can feel yourself being as inside of it as you ever can when you're reading words and imagining it. So I have a tendency to really go for the details, to be like what it looked like, what it sounded like, and that to me is a version of what it felt like as well. And that, you know, that takes up a lot of space. That takes up a lot of time. There's not much room for the details after that. But more seriously, it also is very much an attempt to reckon with the fact that I couldn't tell you what literally happened. I could tell you what day it was or, yeah, I don't even know if I could tell you what color shirt I was

wearing. Things like that are outside of me but the the remains of the experience, the feelings as I remember them, the after effects as I'm trying to get down what I'm thinking in my head onto the page, that's more that's more what I want my writing to do than to literally say why I got divorced. You know, again, much to the frustration of many people, I'm sure. But that's okay. That's their right as well. What were you wearing when you separated? This is such a good question. Or when you guys, when you called it it what were you wearing when you called it? I have no idea. I know it was winter but I truly I can't even

remember because you know another thing I talked about in the book is that because I was so broke you know working in media in New York in order to pay for our last hour with the divorce lawyer, I sold basically all my clothes. And so a lot of what had been my wardrobe from these years of working funny jobs at like boutiques, all went to Beacon's Closet. And so like, I think that kind of influenced how I remember those details even,

because I don't have those outfits, but maybe that's for the best. You know? Maybe it is. New wardrobe, new me. Oh yeah. Did you ever, did you fill the wardrobe back out? Do you have clothes now? I have clothes now. I do. I am well dressed. I'm very lucky. I like got a bunch of stuff from my favorite store in Toronto, VSP, for the book tour and that felt very like full circle moment, you know? I had sold all the stuff at a consignment store and now I'm getting so many better things back. That's it for today. I'm Manika Ramen-Wilms. This episode was produced by Kashima Hylovic.

It was mixed and edited by David Crosby. Thanks so much for listening.