It seems incredibly reductive to call this a break-up comic but, well, it is a graphic novel that goes through Corinne’s break-up with a serious boyfriend in detail. If you hate such things I guess you should avoid this, but that can only be the case if you’ve solved the mysteries of all relationships and have no use for such things any more. And if you’ve done that, please share your wisdom with the rest of us! Ahem. This one starts off with Corinne setting the stage, explaining how she moved across the country to be with her boyfriend and how there’s nothing neat about a break-up and that the very term should probably be changed. From there we see her pinpoint the exact moment when things started going bad, and it’s a doozy. She asked him where he saw the relationship going (this was after three years of dating) and he made it perfectly clear that he could never see them getting married, and that even though he definitely wanted kids he could not see them having kids together. Unsolicited relationship advice for the youngsters: this right here is the moment that you run. Three years is a long time to be dating, and if this is still the perspective of your significant other while you think this is the person that you’re going to be spending the rest of your life with, run for it! He/she can’t lay it out for you any clearer than her boyfriend did here. Still, that would be a very short comic, and she already explained that break-ups are never as neat as the term implies, so after breaking up a few months later she spent the next few years pining over him, pestering her friends with stories about it, and trying to break things down so that the whole relationship made some kind of sense. This is where the comic really shines, as she goes to great lengths to show that reason is often not to be found in a situation like this, no matter how hard she tried. I don’t want to spoil the ending, but she seems like a much more grounded person these days, and that’s one of the few benefits of getting your heart broken. I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of this, cringing at a few bits that struck too close to home while laughing at others for the very same reason. If you know someone who has recently been dumped and they’re going through something like this, buy them a copy (or go to a local library, you cheap bastard) and they will thank you for it. Reading this might not make the pain go away, but it will make a break-up easier to live through. $15
