The Best Books for a Broken Heart
For years after my last failed relationship, I would hoard lines from books that seemed to describe my ex perfectly and devastatingly. “It gratified him to feel like a desperate man,” Willa Cather writes of the surly husband, Frank, in O Pioneers! “His unhappy temperament was like a cage; he could never get out of it; and he felt that other people, his wife in particular, must have put him there.” Yes, yes, that was exactly how he was! I thought, scribbling down the quote.
Even the smallest moment in Anna Karenina, that breakup classic, could conjure visions of misery. Anna’s husband completely loses his powers of reasoning whenever he sees a woman cry: “The emotional distress wrought in Alexey Alexandrovich by tears on such occasions would find expression in a rapid loss of temper,” Leo Tolstoy writes. My own ex’s inability to handle emotions was all there. The great Russian novelist understood.
During a breakup, when being alone takes on a new rawness and intensity, the need to find your own life
