|
| |
Five Men Who Broke My Heart
by Susan Shapiro
The ex files.
Have you ever thought about the ones that got away? Ever found yourself thinking "what if" about past relationships?
Journalist Susan Shapiro has. In fact, she wrote a book about it.
In the midst of a midlife crisis on the brink of her 40th birthday, she found herself a frustrated novelist and wannabe mother with a completed manuscript that publishers kept rejecting, married to a workaholic comedy writer who travelled a lot and is unable to father the child she thought she wanted.
And the “spark” had gone out of their marriage.
Feeling insecure, she perked up when she heard from an ex-boyfriend named Brad. “I hadn't seen Brad in ten years,” she divulges in anticipation of their reunion. “In ten minutes he was coming back to see me. Not to say ‘I'm sorry,' ‘I can't forget you,' or better yet, ‘No woman has ever been able to replace you.'” The real reason Brad, now a professor at Harvard, had sought her out was because he wanted her to interview him about his upcoming book for one of the publications she wrote for.
But still, she decided to take advantage of the opportunity to ask Brad some questions about where their relationship had gone wrong.
She fell, reluctantly, for Brad when she was 16 and attending college, because he reminded her of the “fierce rivalry” she had experienced while growing up with three brothers. Although the relationship had ended with college, the butterflies that appeared in her stomach prior to their recent reunion told her that she'd never really gotten over him.
With her biological clock ticking menacingly, she thought, "If I'd married Brad, I'd have children by now, but we'd surely be divorced. If I was single, I could have his baby without marriage." But then “$20,000 worth of therapy kicked in…. [She] still hated him.”
She spends the remainder of the book reanalyzing this and other past relationships.
Meeting with Tom, another old flame from college, made her reflective of “How strong-minded, brave, and sure of everything" she was in her 20s. "I was jealous of my old self, she says.”
Also among the ex files are George, now also a college professor, and Richard, a writer who was less than pleased by a vicious comment she had made about him in a magazine article she had written after their breakup.
Her fifth ex, David, is now a dentist in Toronto. When she started her search for him, she found eight phone listings for dentists by that name. “There was one problem,” though, she writes. “I forgot how polite Canadians were. For three days, it rained David Greens. All eight returned my call, none was him [sic]. They sounded nice. I felt bad, like I was disappointing them. Yet it was almost fun, as if rejecting eight David Greens could atone for the horrendous way my David Green had left me.”
When she finally tracked him down through a mutual friend, she learned he felt the same way. His response to her e-mail request for a meeting, in part, was “I would rather take out my appendix with a bottle of Jack and a dull spoon.”
Her journey into the past sometimes led to self-revelation, as in, “The man who I feared didn't think I was smart enough was my father. That might be why I had the idea to see my exes now.” “…I needed absolution from all my father figures.” She also briefly explores her relationship with her mother, whose response is “No, you're acting like you're 15 again.”
Strangely enough, it is her husband Aaron, whose credits include Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld, who evokes the most sympathy. Despite the fact that she criticizes him for doing things too slowly, for instance, his rebuttal is “There's a Zen saying I like, ‘When late, walk slower.'”
If you can overlook the frequent references to drug use that sometimes make it seem Shapiro wants to be the poster child for marijuana legalization, her story is interesting enough. Take this one to the beach this summer and let someone else muse about the past for you.
Title: Five Men Who Broke My Heart
Author: Susan Shapiro
Publisher: Delacorte Press
ISBN: 038533723X
Review written by: Marc Duane Anderson
Reviewer's Rating:7.5
Reader's Rating: 1.00
Reader's Votes: 1
Talk to other readers about this story.
|
|
|
|
|
|
