How To Get Over A Breakup: 7 People On What To Read When Your Heart Is Broken
1. Ready Player One by Ernie Cline
Sometimes you wonder if you weren’t normal enough for a relationship. You wonder if your eccentricities and proclivities for obscure 80s pop culture make you un-lovable, un-datable, un-relatable. If you could just be more normal maybe you could find someone, or at least wouldn’t have lost someone. You start thinking you should drink more beer, watch more sports, talk about ‘grown up things’ like 401k’s and taxes.
Then along comes Ready Player One, which is wildly popular, and you think, “Huh, maybe I’m not a complete nutjob.” But you are. And so are millions of other people. They’re all nutjobs, just like you. And there’s some hope that you’ll find a compatible nutjob that doesn’t think you should be more normal, because for her, ‘nutjob’ is normal. For her the beer swilling, sports watching, 401k obsessing asshole is the outlier.
2. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence scared me so much that it led me right into a breakup and then propelled me through it. It’s a story about obscenely rich nineteenth century New Yorkers having feelings and dealing with upper-crust problems. Even though I was a broke twenty-first-century Seattleite, I found the “hero” — a man burdened by a bunch of society bullshit—relatable to an unpleasant extent. “The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.” I read that line and cried uncontrollably for awhile, and then I broke up with my very nice boyfriend. After moving into a new apartment and demolishing my bank account, I skimmed some underlined passages again. I didn’t feel like “the dwindling figure of a [wo]man to whom nothing was ever to happen,” and my mouth didn’t taste like cinders anymore. My anxiety still spiked when I read about being “buried alive” under the future, but I was alone and unemployed. There was no concrete future under which to be buried, so I didn’t have a meltdown on reading those lines. If nothing else, that felt like measurable progress.
3. Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs
Burroughs is one of my all-time favorite authors and really all of his stuff helps me get through anything. Most of his books are autobiographical and this one is no different, but he is one of the first authors I ever discovered who could make me laugh and cry and have my mind blown with beautiful rhetoric all in the same chapter. The book is a hilarious and emotional medley of personal and self-deprecating anecdotes about love, loss, failure, and life. It took me out of my world for a while and planted me into one that was infinitely more chaotic and amusing, and in that way it made all my little struggles and tribulations feel like beautiful pieces of the mosaic that would ultimately become my life story. Books like this one take the sting and the seriousness out of disappointment, and sometimes that’s all we really need.
4. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
I don’t want to make this into a recent-college-grad-finds-himself-in-the-city type thing, but…the book takes place in New York and I’d just had my first breakup in New York. I read this in the winter of 2011, which was brutal. Metaphorically, mostly. My almost-boyfriend wasn’t texting me back, and I hadn’t yet taught myself not to send several frantically nonchalant texts in a row.
I felt exactly like the protagonist of this book, Lenny — mostly because I was in Speech Bubble Hell. The book takes place in the near-future. Everyone in the book wears these tiny amulets called “äppäräts” (read: cell phones in ~5 years) that allow you to view the Fuckability, Personality, and Anal/Oral/Vaginal Preference ratings of anyone around you. It’s social media on weird, horrible steroids. Electronic messaging gone haywire. Lenny, a clumsy Russian Jew, can’t really handle it — he’s in love with a woman who trumps him in Fuckability and can run circles around him on her äppärät. This book made me realize things could be worse. Way worse.
—Harris Sockel (h/t Crissy Milazzo)
5. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein
It was the first book that my father gave me and told me I would love. I’ve read the book dozens of times no matter if I am sad, lonely, ecstatic, or angry.
It brings me to a place where adventure trumps emotion, especially during breakups. It’s not an advanced book, nor is it an exceptionally deep one. But it serves as a constant reminder that there are always new journeys to take, and during my last breakup, discovering how to live single was quite the journey for me to take. The Hobbit served as a perpetual reminder not to be afraid of that.
6. Internet Fanfiction
Last March I left the man I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, and the emotional ramifications of that breakup were delayed because I emerged from the relationship with some serious career goals. About six months after it was all said and done, I started to actually feel some grief. The delayed reaction was probably just stereotypical millennial neuroticism, but I digress. I considered ruminating on all the D.H. Lawrence I read in my post breakup haze. I thought that would sound intellectual. But can I be honest? You know what actually helped me stop wallowing in self-pity and actually made me want to attempt to reclaim myself sexually? Listening to La Bouche and reading fanfiction.
After I wrote this exposé on Fangirls for Medium, I kept getting roped into all the fanfic — and at first I was like, humiliated to even think that I wanted to spend any of my hours allotted to reading on it — like, wasn’t I just as bad as all the people I’ve been ripping on for reading Fifty Shades? Then I just shut the fuck up and stopped over-intellectualizing it and just realized that sometimes, the best thing you can do in the face of serious grief, especially post a really nasty breakup is just read some good ol’ fashioned smut. My brain was tired of nitpicking every single aspect of the relationship that I’d failed in. It was tired of replaying every single syrupy, thick, subcontext-laden conversation we’d had in all the years we were together. I just started crawling into bed at night — alone, and not quite used to that yet — and I thought, “You know what, fuck it. I have approximately eleven minutes before I fall asleep from pure exhaustion and no, I don’t want to read Kant’s ever-loving Moral Philosophy. I want three paragraphs of your finest, flowery, flowing prose describing a single touch to a woman’s inner thigh.” I’m not saying fanfic gave me a second sexual awakening, but I’m not saying it didn’t. . .
7. Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
Some might call her the poor man’s Joan Didion, or Henry Miller with a vagina, but I don’t like it when an artist’s context is another artist. Erica Jong is incisively intelligent and hyper-sexed like Didion and Miller; but her combination of those traits with her unique sense of bittersweet defiance, her unsinkable nature and refusal to accept her lot in life, and what can only be called her gritty sense of herself, which makes Jong a good friend in a breakup.
She also offers you good sex, but not painful romantic sex. Instead, she lets you in on her notion of the zipless fuck. Imagine a breezy sexual affair, a casual moment of seduction, the sort stolen erotic moment you experience when you travel, but one conducted lightly, easily, in passing, it’s a taste of pleasure without the problems of promiscuity. Yes, it’s very much a Seventies idea of sexuality, but it’s also the closest America ever got to feeling French. If you’re in a breakup, reading about this model of emotional individualism might do your heart good. You’re on your own. And as your heart heals, reading about a few zipless fucks might help get your lusty imagination back in the game. So, dip a toe into the sexy Seventies and splash around with one of the smartest, funniest writers of the era.
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