Love Is a Four-Letter Word: Bad Breakups 101

Bad Breakup Hall of Fame: Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston in the 2006 flick

“There’s something about a bad play that stays with you in a way a good one just can’t,” my friend Eric mused as we exited a bone-numbing production of  Edward Albee’s Seascape. The same holds for bad relationships. You might have fond memories of your high school crush, but they probably can’t compete with the blinding flashes of pain and fury that accompany thoughts of the man/woman who did you wrong.

Some of the best writers around play out their personal pain–and chalk up some hard-earned revenge– in a new anthology edited by  Michael Taeckens. I got an advance look at  Love Is A Four-Letter Word (Plume) thanks to one of its contributors, Michelle Green, a brilliantly caustic writer who–trust me, I used to edit her–you’d be nuts to cross. And yet, somebody did.

“You’ll probably recognize him,” Michelle said of the object of her evisceration. So it was with more than a little dread that  I turned immediately to her chapter, “Love and War Stories,” which opens with the brutally honest sentence, “By the time I turned thirty, my life in New York had taken on a desperate edge that made me easy pickings for sorry specimens.”

Fortunately, the “Jude” of her story–a guy not nearly as endearing as the one in the Beatles song–is someone I know only tangentially. And in recounting their entanglement, Michelle manages to capture both the dreary romance of Manhattan–”I walked alone into one of those rainstorms where streets were flooding and rivers of trash were sweeping by the curbs”–and the melancholy of her sojourn among the “sisterhood of the damned,” those women struggling to “engage in sexual drama without getting burned.”

The relationship comes to a crashing, inevitable conclusion during a trek through India, a trip Michelle signed on for in the hope that “the cutthroat impulses and bravado that made him such a shoddy boyfriend could only help in less-developed countries.”

Of course, they don’t, and Love Is A Four-Letter Word is filled with equally cautionary, if often rollicking, tales of false hopes, smashed promises and reckless affairs. There’s the by turns comic and horrific “Twenty-five to One Odds,” which details Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s attempt to celebrate turning 25 by systematically bedding 25 guys.  And in a tale that you’d think couldn’t possibly live up to its title–”Exactly like Liz Phair, Except Older. And with Hypochondria”–Dan Kennedy writes winningly of dating a woman who “was convinced she and her love of self-help books could make a well-organized, ambitious, proactive, so-called normal man of me.” The inimitable Lynda Berry even contributes a bad breakup comic strip, “Head Lice.”

I read with particular horror D.E. Rasso’s  “The Rules of Repulsion,” not only for its odious love story but for the awful accuracy of its depiction of “Camden College,” the fictional institution–and I do mean institution–I also attended (and which stars in Brett Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction). “When I think about it now,” Rasso writes of her hipper-than-thou, abusive lover, “I can understand the Dateline NBC stories about those women married to serial killers.” And her boyfriend, Booth, isn’t her only problem; Rasso notes that “even at a school full of maladroit, narcissistic, and completley unhinged personalities, I wasn’t fitting in very well.”

That pretty much sums up my whole life, but that’s for another anthology. As for now, I’m content to sift through other people’s romantic dramas. As Neal Pollack says in his introduction to Love Is A Four-Letter Word, “Its always nice to know that no matter how badly you’ve screwed up your life, someone else has done far, far worse.”