Why We Broke Up (or: The Human Experience)

So I bought a copy of Why We Broke Up a couple of weeks ago, but hadn't yet started reading it til last week - then a few pages only at first, standing in my bookshop after it closed, waiting for my coworkers to be ready to leave, saying to myself "Well shit, now I really do have to read this soon."

I re-started the book when I was last at work, and finished it today/tonight - bookending going to the actual event for the book (going, not working!) by being in the middle of it, and finishing it. Daniel Handler, of Lemony Snicket-Series of Unfortunate Events-snarky fame is what has made many people pick up this book. Some have picked it up because of the book's strange weight, a product of the quality of paper necessary to support Maira Kalman's fantastically unique illustrations (another reason people have paged through this book and gone on to read it). Probably most people have picked it up because no one can resist reading a break-up-romance, because everyone is either always in love, falling in love, or trying to get over love: and a breakup story is perfect for all of those.

You meet Minerva Green, known as Min to everyone but her grandmother, a quirky, geeky, unique teenaged girl who somehow winds up heartbroken by the co-captain of the basketball team. It's both nothing and everything you expect. Min is returning to Ed all the debris of their relationship, and with each object writing a letter that explains the events of their relationship. It's the thing where from the beginning you see why the two don't work together, why their relationship was doomed from the start - but still hoping, with each repetition of "and that's why we broke up" after a new observation on an otherwise poignant memory, that somehow the epilogue of this story will be a happy ending - or at least, an open one.

Min and Ed are real people, not the least because you know you don't know everything about them. Min's letter to Ed doesn't explain her relationship with her father, seemingly estranged, and she never did find out what happened with the mother of the boy she fell in love with - or, for that matter, his father who is never mentioned. You read their story, told through the beautiful and - at times - incoherent lens of first loveandheartbreak, and are swept up in the emotions. You're not seeing yourself and your lover (or the ex-lover you're remembering, or the not-lover you're wishing for) as Min and Ed, but behind the images of your story are overlaid your own memories - or wishes - of someone else, and other experiences that brought out these feelings for you. It's that damn personal effect that makes you want to cling to the hope of Min and Ed succeeding against the odds, of a reconciliation at the last, at some bittersweet promise for a future after growth, after healing - but you're going to have to read it to find out if that happens. Because if I tell you, you may just give up now.

But it's worth the story, and the heartbreak, to have the burden of emotion taken off of you for a night, so you can ride along with someone else's joy, and commiserate with their heartbreak without having to feel it yourself. Trace the pictures of each object-memory as you go, and walk through your own closet in your mind, picking up the debris of your relationships - and remember why you loved, and why you broke up. I still hope...but I also remember why.