The melodramatic intensity we bring to our own heartbreak is extremely funny to writer Monica Heisey.
Her debut novel Really Good, Actually draws on the "isolating" yet "absurd" experience of getting divorced at 28.
Monica Heisey Photo: Supplied
It's easy to feel shame after a breakup, the former Schitts Creek writer tells Jesse Mulligan, especially if you've had a wedding – i.e. made a "big ambitious promise" in front of everyone you know.
In the aftermath of her own divorce and desperate to read something relatable on the subject, Heisey could find only novels about older, wealthier people.
On a practical level, when the only divorces you've seen are possibly your parents and your friend's parents (who hide the worst of it), you don't really know what you're in for.
"You're kind of going in blind but also feel the weight on your shoulders of the intense history of this concept."
To ensure her own divorce book was funny, Heisey chose to create a comically impulsive fictional character rather than write a memoir.
Photo: supplied
Really Good, Actually's central character Maggie – like many people facing divorce – has a "fantasy" that her own will be unusually amicable.
"[People think] they're going to stay friends, they're going to skip the intense conflict part and they're going to go straight to being very mature, comfortable 'see you at a party and make ten minutes of winsome small talk', but I think that's very rare."
In the book, Maggie tries to trick herself and her Instagram followers into thinking she's moved on from her divorce.
Yet via "raw data" from the inner workings of her brain – aka her Google search history – readers are given the true story.
Over time, Maggie opens herself up to the care of some generous friends, as Heisey did.
"These are people with their own lives who are choosing to make extra space for a friend's sadness, which is its own, to me, quite romantic act."
Seeking and receiving support from friends, family and community is the only way through a heartbreak, Heisey says.
"It feels really devastating, it feels like the world's ending… but on the other side of it, it's a really everyday, quotidian experience. Most people have been through it multiple times in their life and you sort of know you're going to survive it even as you feel very intensely that you won't."
Trying to move on from a broken heart without doing any "internal boring stuff" – as Maggie does at first – is a losing battle, she says.
"Everything feels so intense. To lean into that intensity is, I think, a really hopeful act … The main thing you have to do is just let it be unpleasant. You can't skip over the part … you just have to let it hurt."
