Why You Should Read The Heartbreak Years

If a man is your only problem, that’s an easy fix
–Minda Honey, Author of The Heartbreak Years

I spent the last four years as a high school English teacher at a small arts school in the Midwest. It was a humbling experience, being responsible for the education of children stepping into adulthood, but more than anything, it was a reminder that the lives of young people, their experiences, trials, and yes, even those first relationships, are exceptionally difficult.

I’ve read dozens of bildungsromans, coming-of-age stories, personal essays, and memoirs that communicate this idea, that remind us of the lessons we take for granted as we grow from the people we are into the people we want to become. None, however, brought me through the range of emotions- anger, sadness, empathy, laughter, self-reflection, and acceptance- as Minda Honey’s debut memoir, The Heartbreak Years. I had the pleasure of meeting Minda at a writing residency based in north-eastern France. She was quick-witted, fun, and seemed to have a humorous anecdote at hand for any situation. When I picked up a copy of her book after the residency, I had my reservations; I don’t often read romance, and I wondered if an extended personal essay on heartbreak would be “my thing” as a then 27-year-old man. Those reservations were completely unfounded; I tore through the book in a single sitting and have found myself revisiting it often.

Upon my first read, I decided that The Heartbreak Years isn’t about romance—it's about womanhood, the long pilgrimage a young woman endures in her quest to find herself. Through the expectations of boyfriends who refuse to plan or commit, through the crushing weight of an office job, and despite the overarching narrative that a relationship completes a woman. 

On my second read, after I’d handed the book off to a friend who kept dating losers (what honestly felt like different iterations of the same loser, even), I revisited the memoir’s relationship to romance and decided that romance was the wrong word. It’s about love, I thought to myself. The places where we look for it, find it, lose it, and rediscover it. It’s about the ways we can lose track of self-love in the pursuit of external love. 

In my most recent reading, I came away from the book looking at myself. Minda’s memoir reimagines her onto the page as a millennial college graduate emerging into adulthood amid the first Black presidency and a housing crisis. In contrast, I entered college with Donald Trump taking office in 2016 and graduated into the global pandemic. Now I understand that both my prior readings- that the book is about womanhood, that the book is about love- are both incomplete. In reality, the book is a mirror that reflects back at us the universal challenge of living in a complicated world, and it’s handled skilfully, with humor and empathy; there are no real villains in the book, only people in complicated circumstances, enduring their own versions of heartbreak.

Fortunately, Minda was willing to discuss her work with the Lenox & Parker Team in more detail. Click below to watch Lenox & Parker’s Editor in Chief, Christal Jordan discuss The Heartbreak Years with Minda Honey.