Five Men Who Broke My Heart
A Memoir
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
In this honest, hilarious, fiercely intelligent memoir, journalist Susan Shapiro dares to do what every woman dreams of: track down the five men who'd broken her heart and find out what really went wrong. Between the ages of thirteen and thirty-five, Susan had plunged into love, heart-first, five times. One bad breakup was more hurtful and humiliating than the next.
With insight and daring, Susan chronicles her six-month-long journey back down a road strewn with romantic regret. Although for years she'd blamed her boyfriends for their flagrant infidelity, ludicrous faults, and immature foibles, to her shock she can now suddenly pinpoint the exact moment where she herself screwed up each relationship.
A successful freelance writer living in Manhattan, Susan Shapiro was in the midst of a midlife crisis she called her “no-book-no-baby summer.” Married for five years to Aaron, a workaholic TV comedy writer always on the road, she was beginning to wonder if she'd remain book- and babyless forever. Then the phone rang, and it was Brad, a college flame who'd become a Harvard scientist with a book coming out. Susan offers to interview him, and she winds up launching into all the intense, invasive questions she'd always wanted to ask him. To her surprise, he answers them! This ignites a spark that sends her on a cross-country jaunt back through her lust-littered past.
While Brad is still single, she finds that Heartbreaks Number Two, Three, and Four are not. George, a theater professor, and Richard, a music biographer, are happily married with children. Tom, a handsome blond lawyer in L.A., is getting divorced. Just as it's becoming easy to worm her way back into her exes' good graces, she crashes head-on with David, a wry Canadian root canal specialist. ("It’s the equivalent of what you did to me emotionally," she tells him.) She then gut-wrenchingly relives the agony of splitting up with her first love all over again. Yet somewhere between the tantalizing what-ifs and bittersweet might-have-beens, she finds what she's been searching for all along.
Part relationship manifesto, part confessional, and part valentine to the males in her life she adores, Five Men Who Broke My Heart is for anyone who has ever wondered what became of their first love. Or second, third, fourth, or fifth…
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers of Shapiro's memoir may find themselves wishing her romantic history contained more than five heartbreaking men. Cruel as this may sound, Shapiro's often funny and always heartfelt recollections of past relationships are so entertaining, it's a shame she doesn't have an endless supply of material. The seasoned journalist (the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, etc.) was initially inspired to track down her former lovers when an old college flame found her six months before her 40th birthday, at a time when, although happily married, "I was staggering through a vulnerable stretch of midlife crisis: 'my no-book-no-baby-summer.' " Her and Brad's casual but emotionally freighted meeting (where Brad's features "seemed splattered across his face like a platypus") left Shapiro with a hankering for the lowdown on her other great loves. And so, in part as an escape from the disappointment of infertility, she embarked on a cross-country jaunt to reconnect with her beaux: the beach boy, the biographer, the aptly nicknamed "root canal" and her remarkably tolerant husband, Aaron. In the end, she admits "all of my old boyfriends had lost their luster. They'd been demystified, reduced to friendship. That's what I'd been doing these past six months I had successfully declawed my past." Luckily for her audience, the result is a delightfully kaleidoscopic autobiography of an impulsive and passionate woman who comes of age with style.