I read Emily Henry’s Happy Place the day before yesterday and, despite its title, it made me cry at least four times.
It’s not a spoiler to say that Happy Place is about a breakup, at least, not unless you’re the type of person who avoids even reading book descriptions, and if you are, well, I suppose I’m sorry.
The premise of the book is that a broken-up couple has to pretend not to be broken up in order to enjoy one last group holiday with their besties before the eponymous “happy place” – a sprawling holiday home belonging to one of the group’s parents – is sold and their years-long summer tradition must come to a halt.
The notion of pretending – to be together, to not be together, to be footloose and fancy-free, to be a skilled dancer in order to cover for a sort-of friend who’s just had an abortion – is one that is very familiar to the rom-com genre, and Henry is not reinventing the wheel with this, her seventh book. Nor does she claim to be.
She has written the sort of thoroughly engaging and highly entertaining book one might consider a great beach read (in fact, that’s the title of her fourth book and her adult debut). So why did it reduce me to a puddle of tears, heaving sobs as I turned each page?
The magic of fiction is, I think, in its relatability. As James Joyce wrote, “in the universal is contained the specific”; in writing about personal experiences, moments that feel utterly discrete and isolated in their specificity, we are, in fact, outlining fragments of human existence that are almost universally experienced. Happy Place’s breakup is all of our breakups, and also, simultaneously, only mine.
For a long time, I believed that there could be a “cure” to heartbreak, and that it was simple: falling in love. Love itself was a panacea for all emotional ills. The crude way of saying it – and I did say it, over and over again, in my late teens and twenties – was that the best way to get over someone was to get under someone else, and though I joked about it (often, and to whomever I could get to listen), it was because, contained therein was a kernel of truth. Or so I thought.
And, honestly, it was in reading Happy Place – I was annoyed about the name, too, which felt, as I wiped the snot and tears from my face, as though it was making a mockery of the experience I was having – that I started to think that maybe there is no cure for these heartbreaks. You don’t “get over” anyone, or anything; you just learn to live with a kind of grief for what was, for what could have been.
How many times can a heart be broken and put back together again, before it shatters completely?
I wrote down those words in the autumn of 2018, when the relationship that I had thought would be the relationship ended, sort of out of the blue but also not at all out of the blue. I saw the heart as a ceramic object, one that cracks with every breakup, each romantic disappointment, and is then repaired – the glue being wielded by whoever, or whatever, comes along next to occupy that part of the brain.
I think I’d forgotten that the heart is a muscle, and that when muscles are injured, they tear, then rebuild. They grew bigger with each injury, but they are also changed and, therefore, changeable. Muscles can get stronger, but they can also weaken over time, through lack of use or, even, misuse. The heart can neither shatter nor break but it can tear and wither away. Muscle wastage, it’s called. It becomes hard to use.
It bothers me to dwell on these things. I would like to move on, to draw a line under the past and to look toward the future or, at least, to focus on the present. I am happy now. I love. I am loved, not just by my husband but by our children, by the friends I have made.
And yet: that love is not enough. It doesn’t erase the moments of grief and heartbreak that came before. If I allow my mind to go there, I can relive them with almost pinpoint accuracy. I can taste the tears in the back of my throat. I can feel my heart beating with the anger and panic and frustration at the unfairness of it all. I can call it up from the banks of my memory in an instant; it’s right there, on the tip of my tongue, at the end of a finger, at the front of my mind.
Does that mean I’m not “over” it? Any of it? Or does it just mean that heartbreak is a wound – and, like any other major wound, one that requires treatment and time off and a concerted recovery effort, one that leaves a scar?
William Shakespeare wrote of love as an “ever-fixed mark”, something that I once took to refer only to the final love, the love that, for me, has resulted in marriage, has produced an angel baby who thinks kisses are given with a wide open mouth and tongue extended over the lips of the other.
But then, as I cried into the pages of my book, I started to think that all love – everyone I once loved and each moment spent loving them – is its own distinct, fixed mark, one that cannot be erased by the next love, instead simply landing on top of a previous scar, like wallpaper, glued on in layers, on the wall of a house that’s seen family after family leave their own imprint on it. Peel back one layer and find another, then another. Florals and geometric patterns and chickens – was this once a kitchen? – and linen and and and until the bare bones are exposed. Pass the parcel, but with my heart (and in reverse).
I’m not sure any of it has made me stronger. But it hasn’t made me weaker, either. I’d like to stop thinking of life in binary terms: if I’m not strong, I am weak. If I’m not in love, I’m in loss. If I’m not healed, then, what – I’m still broken?
No.
There is nothing to be ashamed of in not being able to cast off your emotions, in not being able to simply forget, and move on. For those of us who feel deeply – and not all who feel deeply are dwellers, I’m sure, but bear with me – it makes sense that those feelings would not be disposable.
It doesn’t mean anything about your current state, either. Sometimes, closure is not an option, whether that’s on a literal level – he left before I could say goodbye – or simply because you cannot seem to let go of these feelings of hurt and disappointment and regret. We need a new word for closure, maybe, one that doesn’t bring to mind open (or closed) doors.
I don’t feel as though there is any closure in lost love, at least not for me, but that doesn’t mean the proverbial door is open. It just means that it can open. I can turn the knob and peek back through and see everything I saw and feel everything I felt and it just means… I’m human.
In the particular is contained the universal.
My debut book, This is Not About You, a book about dating and sex and love and breakups, is out on July 6th. Please pre-order it here (in Ireland) or here (in the US).