From the moment it started, Min and Ed’s romance was doomed to failure. For six brief weeks their relationship was intense, all consuming, and fated to burn bright, hot, and fast. When the co-captain of the basketball team, notorious playboy, and school’s hottest guy and a quirky, “arty”, cinema-hound girl collide one night at a Bittersweet 16 party for Min’s best friend Al, the gravitational pull overwhelms them but it also creates a black hole from which Min, at least, can’t escape. Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up explores the idea of opposites attracting, the tug of war between their disparate worlds, and the casualties that result from two people trying to create something in a world that won’t allow such a thing to exist.
A boxful of mementos – bottlecaps from the night they met; the ticket stub from their first date; the seedpod from under the tree where they hid from the downpour and shared their first intense make-out session; the pennant from the game; the comb from the motel room; the dried rose petals from the flowers Ed never meant Min to receive – these prizes and debris of their relationship are what Min is returning to Ed, along with a letter. Each item evidence of their ill-fated romance and the reason, in and of itself, about why they broke up. As Min writes to Ed, telling him the whole truth of what happened, she relives their relationship one fantastic, frenzied, fated day at a time. You can see, maybe more clearly than Min does, that it wasn’t just one thing that doomed them. What Min also succeeds in getting across, at least to the reader, if not to Ed, is that even though she’s “different” from any other girl he’s ever dated, she still has feelings, a heart that will break, and the right to be treated better than she was.
Each memento is pictured in a watery-watercolor image by Maira Kalman and as Min goes through each item in the box her dashed hopes and heartbreak become increasingly poignant and painful. Her letter is at times pointed and succinct and at others, gloriously stream-of-conscious that captures the hustle and madness of a day in the halls of high school, the frenzied pace of a basketball game and parties, and the overwhelming intensity of a first romance. It’s a story of a breakup and one girl’s realization that there’s life after a broken heart.
- Posted by Cori