SUCKER PUNCH: Essays, by Scaachi Koul

NO FAULT: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, by Haley Mlotek

I can’t recall the first time I saw “The Misfits,” John Huston’s 1961 cinematic masterpiece about a quartet of mutually disenfranchised wanderers, but I’m certain it was after I’d become a divorcée. I know it wouldn’t have stuck with me so permanently otherwise. Set in Reno, Nev., a city once as famous for its hassle-free divorces as its casinos, the film is a timeless meditation on what it means to lose.

I was not yet 30 when my first marriage dissolved, by which point I’d seen several friends’ relationships likewise buckle beneath the looming specter of forever. It seemed that every few years there was a wave of these breakups, and I began to predict them like weather patterns. “It’s divorce season,” I’d say, and if time has mitigated the phenomenon in my own life, I wasn’t surprised to find confirmation that it still wreaks its havoc elsewhere.

In two new nonfiction books, the authors Scaachi Koul and Haley Mlotek find their inspiration in the emotional maelstrom that follows divorce. Reading them in parallel, I was reminded not only of how hard it is to stay together, but of how painful it is to try to recalibrate who you are when “we” suddenly becomes “I.”

“Sucker Punch” is the follow-up to Koul’s 2017 essay collection, “One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter,” a book that she repeatedly references in order to address the “before” and “after” qualities of a failed marriage.

One cause of her marriage’s breakdown, according to Koul, was her self-confessed propensity for oversharing the intimate details of her life. (A hazard, perhaps, of contemporary culture writing.) “The internet is a record of my failures in so many ways,” says Koul, “but none more blatant than how the person I love most in the world and I failed each other.”

If Koul once found inspiration in the story of how her asymmetrical relationship thrived, here she offers an internal memo detailing the reasons it failed: infidelity, irreconcilable cultural differences and lapses in communication. “I’m at my best when embroiled in a fight,” Koul writes of one fundamental incompatibility. “I thrive in conflict, like an oyster that forms a pearl from unwanted intruders.”

These essays, organized under the Hindu pillars of samsara, karma, dharma and moksha, are deftly written, they are humorous and cutting, but perhaps their greatest strength lies in the margins. Contending with her participation in a world that collapses privacy and publicity down to nothing, Koul finds her momentum in reflecting on the interior details of her family. What are the cultural conditions that make us think divorce is a measure of failure, she asks, and how do we negotiate ourselves out of them?

Mlotek’s memoir takes a different tone. Oscillating between a personal accounting of heartache and a granular sociological deconstruction of the institutions of marriage and divorce, this book is at its best when the author writes about herself. Often painful and longing but sometimes academic to a fault, Mlotek thrives when she finds permission to chronicle her own experiences outside a historical survey.

She comes from a long line of divorces; her mother was a marriage counselor. “My entire world was divorce,” she writes. Sometimes hamstrung by an impulse to thoroughly taxonomize the economic and gendered details of marital breakdown, Mlotek underestimates the significance of her own wisdom.

Mlotek’s writing reaches toward — and actually meets — poetry when she allows it to. (“I could tell you about our last night,” she writes of the end of the marriage, “but mostly I think about how the night passed no matter what we did to hold still.”) But she is too often hampered by a frustrating instinct to situate her own experience within the universal.

Though Koul and Mlotek have written stylistically different accounts of life after marriage, their reflections repeatedly converge. Each book roils with descriptions of disappointment, fugitive desire, the shame of failure and the suffocating dread that punctuates the moments of calm between marital fights.

Both “Sucker Punch” and “No Fault” casually reference “Anna Karenina” — or at least Tolstoy’s indelible opening line (“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”). Thinking about the similarities between these writers’ divorces and mine, between mine and every other divorce I’ve known the inside of, it occurred to me that while it might be a salve to see our own experiences committed to paper by someone else, sometimes there’s nothing special about watching the bottom fall out and surviving it. Maybe the truth is that all happy marriages are happy in different ways; maybe it’s every divorce that’s exactly the same.

I wonder what it would have meant to me all those years ago to read two accounts that so precisely mirrored my own experiences, what might have been changed by the knowledge that humor and pain can and do have their place. What neutralizes the flaws in these two books is that their authors unapologetically claim ownership of their stories; it took me years to recognize that whatever has happened to me is mine to tell.

As it was, I took a strange comfort in “The Misfits.”

“Here’s to Nevada, the Leave It state,” Thelma Ritter’s character tells Marilyn Monroe’s, raising a glass of room-temperature whiskey to the younger woman’s recent divorce. “You got money you want to gamble? Leave it here. You got a wife you want to get rid of? Get rid of her here.” I think the comparison between a slot machine and an altar makes a lot of sense — both places are wishing wells, a roll of the dice; better luck next time.

SUCKER PUNCH: Essays | By Scaachi Koul | St. Martin’s Press | 262 pp. | $28

NO FAULT: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce | By Haley Mlotek | Viking | 294 pp. | $28