Why We Broke Up - Daniel Handler

[troisoiseaux]

Read Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler, a 2011 YA novel I'd originally read in high school but that I a. had completely forgotten about and b. don't?? think?? I'd ever realized was by the Daniel Handler, better known for his writing as Lemony Snicket, until recently stumbling across a copy in a used bookstore. (I was not re-read-curious enough to buy the second-hand copy, but I found it on Libby.) The tl;dr plot is that a teenage girl unravels the threads of a short-lived relationship through the objects she'd collected during it: bottle caps, ticket stubs, etc. (Illustrated, which is a fun touch.) I can see what appealed to teenage!me - not a big reader of YA even when I was the target audience - about this book, which is that it's sort of endearingly pretentious: main character Minerva "Min" Green is obsessed with old and/or foreign films, and her narration is full of references to (fictional) movies and actors; the novel opens at her best friend's "bitter sixteen" party; the narrative voice has a very circa-2010s Tumblr Poetry vibe, addressed to "you", i.e., the boy Min is breaking up with. On the other hand, it is a teenage romance novel from 2011, which reminded me why I was, and am, not particularly into romance novels and also that 2011 was actually quite a while ago. (It also occurred to me, this time, that this can't possibly be set in 2011: there is exactly one reference to Min having a cell phone, but no one texts, she and her boyfriend have late-night calls over their landline home phones, and the internet does not appear to exist.)

On reflection, I wonder whether this was an intentional exercise in writing from the point of view of a character who would be the manic pixie dream girl love interest in a different story? Her love interest is a fondly baffled jock who says things like "I don't know any girls like you" and doesn't really get why it's important to her that the old woman they see at the cinema is maybe, possibly the actress in the film they just saw but goes along with the idea of throwing her (the actress) an eighty-ninth birthday party. (Spoiler alert: they do not have the birthday party, because he cheats on her with an ex and also the starlet in question died years ago.) There's a whole bit at the end about how she's not actually arty or interesting, she's just herself, a flawed and normal person; honestly, I'm not sure if that weighs for or against this theory.