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BEING DUMPED
THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. AS DAVID CASSIDY so memorably — and wisely — sang, breaking up is hard to do. Although, to be fair, it’s a lot harder for the chucked than the chucker. When you’re deep in that blinding misery of rejection, the life lessons are not immediately visible. But you can take it from novels that breaking up can be the right thing to do, too.
There is such a thing as constructive chucking, which Jane Eyre pulls off with aplomb. Mr Rochester has proposed to her, it’s the realisation of her dream and yet somehow feels like a fairy tale — she can’t quite trust it.
She loves him, and yet as soon as they’re engaged, he starts to treat her like a doll, a ‘performing ape’.
He smiles upon her as a sultan would smile at a ‘slave his gold and gems have enriched’. She’s not comfortable with it at all. When she finds out the real impediment to their marriage, it’s up to her to end it and plunge herself into ‘an awful blank; something like the world when the deluge was gone by’. But — and, yes it does take a while — eventually that act of strength on her part leads to the ultimate happiness of both.
In that great modern love story, David Nicholls’ One Day, everyone gets dumped at some point. From the inauspicious beginnings of their onenight stand as students, Emma and Dexter go their separate ways and through various heartaches — she with her boyfriend, he with his wife — confiding in each other, alternately supporting and hating each other.
In the end, it’s those separate miseries that lead them to the truth — their ‘friendship’ is, in fact, the real thing.
Elizabeth Jane Howard’s magnificent The Long View is the story of a marriage, told backwards. It begins with Antonia and Conrad throwing a dinner party, after which he plans to leave her for good.
It ends with the moment of their meeting. And that’s when we see the true reason for the end of their relationship: they should never have got together in the first place.