Ruby Lang’s I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is a marvel of a novella, tightly written, tightly plotted, and filled with incredible character work. It will break your goddamn heart, but it will also make you laugh (and cry your eyes out—I think mine might be swollen, shit), and wince in sympathy, and, finally, it will give you the sort of happy ending that is exquisitely real and exquisitely beautiful.
Nat Chen and Ben Nakamura knew each other—in every sense of the word—back in college. But now, years later, they’ve gone in very different directions. Ben’s a successful young adult novelist, coping better with his anxiety now than he did in their youths and finishing off a series with an unlikable protagonist who miiiiiight be loosely based on Nat; Nat, always frosty, is struggling with the loss of her mother (with whom she didn’t have the greatest relationship) and caring for her half-sister while being frozen out by her father and trying to find a job in a market that is choking everyone out. Nat and Ben are, in short, incredibly relatable characters, the sort of people we all knew in college, and know now. Maybe we’ve even been one of them, or both.
This really is a novella: there are six chapters, through which I tore, and an epilogue, which is hella satisfying. But, because Lang is a goddamn magician, she packs in nuanced character development, a delicious second-change romance, and family and friend dynamics. We realize fast, for instance, that Nat’s chilly exterior was a sort of armor for her, a way to try to cope with her own broken home (and with the fact that her mother married the guy she had an affair with).
When Nat finally acknowledges the armor it is bittersweet, a nod to what we as her readers have already guessed: “He wanted, she thought with sudden insight, to be more like her, to care less about everything so that it didn’t tear him apart. But he hadn’t known that her problem wasn’t that she didn’t care. It was that she cared too much.” That moment, when she tells the truth to herself (and the reader), presages its own awakening, courtesy both of her really awful stepfather (he’s really, really awful) and her own strength, aided by Ben’s loyalty and by her boss’s disapproving but steady presence. (Her boss, you see, is also one of Ben’s closest friends.) Lang also uses it to help build up that beautiful ending (I cried my fucking eyes out, by the way), and to make Nat, and Ben, and their HEA, both more beautiful and more real.
Every book I’ve read by Lang does an amazing job of world-building in the midst of tremendous character work. I’ve talked about her Uptown Collection, which I love beyond all reason or rational thought, but in truth, I feel that way about nearly everything she writes. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is, perforce, a true Lang tour de force, as she reminds us of the horrors of student housing and the oddities of social media while carrying us along to our happily ever after.
Remember what I said about student housing? Well, Ben and Nat’s shared undergrad hellhole is just the sort of student house we’ve all visited: “The house they’d all shared two blocks from the university had been held together with duct tape and asbestos. Too many years of being rented to too many university students made what once was an ugly, depressing vinyl-sided house even uglier. It exuded the kind of creepy sadness of middle-aged men who went to frat parties and tried to pick up girls.” I never lived in that house, myself, but you know what? A lot of my friends did!
Lang excels in creating characters whose struggles are familiar and real, and whose eventual happy endings are the more satisfying for how hard-won they feel. This time, as I read I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, I felt like I had been, at one point or another, both Nat and Ben—sometimes at the same time. Unlike Nat, my demeanor has tended toward bright and sunny: it’s an incredibly good way to hide depression, and nobody guesses you’re suicidal when you smile a lot. (Please don’t worry: I’m not going to say that I’m fabulous now, but I’m a hell of a lot better.) I’ll acknowledge that my history of depression, coupled with the armor I’ve built for myself over the years and my own intense anxiety, makes me relate even more to both Nat Chen and Ben Nakamura. But you don’t have to carry my weight of sadness and fear to have your heart broken and pieced back together when you read I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, because it is unbearably beautiful.
Essentially a Nerd 