“Either you have the feeling or you don't”

Let’s bleed into a story of heartbreak – of bottle caps, of a movie ticket, of ugly earrings, a box of matches, of stolen sugar.

Why We Broke Up is about Min Green (a girl with glittering film cameras whirring in her eyes) who takes us on a reel of star-doomed romance – a collection of bittersweet memories, of vignettes that speak of a boy named Ed Slaterton.

She’s labelled ‘arty’; she’s the girl who only dances when tipsy, she memorizes smiles of French heroines and she inadvertently slips down into gold-tinted love with him.

He’s a jock; he buys flowers when girls get mad, he offers her beer, he likes her coffee, he rips a poster and he writes her a note.

Maddening, isn’t it?
I’m going to stop being all vague and making my words like blurry Impressionistic paintings and actually explain the story now. Forgive me (they call me ‘arty’ too).

The story is essentially about why Min and Ed could never be. Each chapter features an object from the box that cocoons their togetherness- at least, what used to be their togetherness. Daniel Handler, the author, sweeps the reader into each new chapter with the mad flow of Hawk Davies’ jazz, a made-up musician in this made-up romance.  Anecdotes and pieced-together memories take shape around each item, like the stolen sugar (the apex of the whole book) and the movie ticket from Greta in the Wild (a brilliant made-up film in this made-up romance).

Isn’t it a heartsick, adolescent notion? To collect the mundane bits and pieces around you, while you’re ‘stupid’ with happiness, and store them in a box so that they may hold that magic polish of lovelorn significance you gave them? Because why would you ever store a protractor if it did not mean a hazily sweet ‘something’? Why would you keep a comb from a motel if it did not count for some tenderness, however temporary that turned out to be?

Min’s story of her and Ed’s disintegration is as fragile and swooping and fizzing as any normal love story ever is. Like mine and yours and your best friend’s too, you know, with that guy from school. And you know it will never work out (the title of the book is, after all, Why We Broke Up) but you rush on reading breathlessly, because you want to know the whys and the hows of it.

Why We Broke Up is really just about two unlikely people falling into mutual, temporary tenderness and it’s all over the place. And it ends. It ends, but it’s bittersweet and reckless as the stolen sugar lying between them. You will laugh and you will wonder and you will swoon and you will curse because that’s what love does to people. Then it ends and the teacup crashes.

And you move on, and you try again (or read it again!).

Daniel Handler has outdone himself so please honour his wonderful work and go out and get this book and sink into it! Bonus: there are beautiful illustrations by Maira Kalman of the box’s objects at the beginning of each chapter. Art! Pictures! Now there’s some cause for excitement…