Heart doctor

Meet Breakup Girl, cult heroine for the lovelorn

by Michelle Chihara

WHEN THE IN-LAWS don't like your wedding dress, there's Dear Abby. When you need the scoop on heavy bondage, there's Dan "Savage Love" Savage. But when three pints of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey and John Hughes's entire oeuvre cannot even begin to ease the pain of his having left you, there is only one agony aunt to turn to: Breakup Girl.

A cartoon character originally created for the book He Loved Me, He Loves Me Not: A Guide to Fudge, Fury, Free Time, and Life Beyond the Breakup (Avon Books), Breakup Girl has been dispensing online advice (you could call her an advice character) since the book's publication in 1996. She is the alter ego of comedian Lynn Harris, who now plays the heart-mending superheroine at a regular live stand-up show in New York City. She is a "superhero who fights crimes of the heart, stops dating indignities, and helps you get your stuff back," and her Web site now boasts a million and a half page views a month. And now, as a full-fledged "media brand" at the Oxygen network, she has a new book, Breakup Girl to the Rescue! A Superhero's Guide to Love, and Lack Thereof (Back Bay Books).

Harris is a Lexington, Massachusetts native who landed in Somerville after college. She came up with the idea for Breakup Girl after (surprise) a break-up. "None of this is about working out my personal issues," she insists. "I was the dumper, so this is also not a revenge story." Still, "I was bummed. I missed him." And out of that funk, Breakup Girl was born.

"I was sitting on the porch of our house and my best friend and I were making up games about how sad I was," she
recalls.

"I said, 'I bet you could say any word in the English language, and it would remind me of Jake.' My friend said, 'Okay . . . burlap.' And I was like, 'Um, we did sack races at his company picnic.' "

Shortly after the "burlap" incident, Harris launched into writing He Loved Me, He Loves Me Not. "As the two of us did our vaudeville act, it dawned on me that there's humor in this," she explains. "There's humor in heartbreak that was not the usual bitter, resentful, pathetic stuff. There's much jauntier, wittier stuff to be written. In fact, maybe there's a whole book full of stuff."

As it turned out, there was more than a book's worth of stuff. The book led to the Web site, on which Harris collaborated with partner and animator Chris Kalb. Somerville gave way to a "studio apartment of justice" in Brooklyn. The rest is break-up history.

Harris's most recent book, Breakup Girl to the Rescue!, is better than the first. Both are funny, but this book has four years of advice-column experience behind it. And, as a result, it has more heart, and more wisdom. It's split into sections, starting with "Relationships: After," continuing through "Relationships: Before," and ending with "Relationships: During." Why does Breakup Girl start at the end? Because every break-up is also a new beginning, of course.

Harris uses letters from her Web site to give vivid color to predicaments ranging from cyber-cheating to inter-office romance. She chooses letters dripping with all the insecurity, desperation, and neurosis that the heartbroken can muster. She calls people on their double standards, cuts them some slack when they're being too hard on themselves, and points out where they are being unfair or unwise. She comforts. She advises against Machiavellian revenge schemes. She makes everyone seem equally ridiculous. But, as she likes to say in her live stand-up show, "We are laughing at the predicaments, not the people, because there but for the grace of God go we."

BG on "Why don't I have a boy/girlfriend?"
Having a boy/girlfriend is like having a car with air-conditioning. It may be more comfortable at times, but there's a whole lot more stuff that can go wrong.

That is just one of several things I would like to point out to the many fine folks who write me to ask:

Dear Breakup Girl,
Why don't I have a boy/girlfriend?

And here's the problem: the folks who ask me that are fine folks. I mean, if they were saying:

Dear Breakup Girl,
I invented the car alarm, my gums bleed when I'm nervous, and I am president of the International Jar-Jar Binks Fan Club . . . why am I alone?

Well, then we'd have a place to start.

Otherwise, it's hard for me to tell you precisely why.

BREAKUP GIRL'S willingness to deal over and over with questions like "Why can't I find a date?" is the perfect example of one of her most superheroic traits: her patience. I, as I admit for sake of disclosure, am a devoted Breakup Girl fan, as are many of my friends. We are particularly impressed with BG's ability -- her desire, even -- to take on the world of high school. We all know that romance reduces even the most mature adults to note-passing and melodrama. But Breakup Girl goes so far as to tackle scores upon scores of letters along the lines of "I am 17 and have NEVER had a girlfriend, will I end my life alone?" She faces them all with the same warmth, humor, and no-bullshit compassion that she uses when answering the adults' letters (although the teens soon will have their own section of her site).

"Frankly," Harris says, "it's not necessarily more wearing to go through teens' than grown-ups' letters." Evidently the differences are few. "Teens'll be like, 'I went out with this guy for a week and three days.' Grown-ups will say seven or eight years. And teens are more likely to have an emissary find out if someone likes them."

Regardless of the age of her petitioners, Breakup Girl says that avoiding empathy overload is the really tough challenge. Heartbreak creates a lot of sadness, and it spans the spectrum of human pain. Breakup Girl's Web site includes a digital bulletin board straight out of a social-work office, with links for people coping with clinical depression, domestic violence, and other serious problems. She has a resident psychiatrist, Belleruth Naparstek, to help her deal with the "stickier issues." Sometimes, she says, "we have to know when to put the letters down and walk away."

BG on relapses versus reunions:

Dear Breakup Girl,
I recently parted ways with my boyfriend over a spaghetti dinner. Shortly after splitting, we met again and promptly hopped into bed. I believed that this encounter meant something, but when I called him to talk he was completely nonchalant. Was it wrong for me to expect more?
-- Tory

Dear Tory,
Ah, Classic Relapse. See, breakups can be right up there with oysters, figs and Red Shoe Diaries in terms of their aphrodisiac qualities.

The clarion call of the Relapse:

"Wow, you look great without . . . commitment."

So, a Relapse and a Reunion are two different animals. People: Safeguard your feelings -- and don't toy with those of others. Break up, or don't; act accordingly. And if you are going to break up, you might as well be eating spaghetti at the time.

Love,
Breakup Girl

BREAKUP GIRL, in the end, simply does what a good friend would do: She calls you on your bullshit, asks the right questions, and makes you laugh through the tears. And she cares. She really, really cares.

Harris sees herself as saving the world, one couple (or ménage à trois, or whatever floats your boat) at a time. "We don't mean to sound self-important or noble, but what we actually think is that relationships are not like the fluff piece at the end of the news," she says. "When it comes to social change, our social lives are the perfect place to start."

And just in case you still feel the urge to ghettoize Breakup Girl into the same category as Cosmo's "Ten Ways To Tell If He Thinks You're Hot," Harris says, "This is, like, what runs us, for both men and women." Forget The Rules and Mars and Venus: "We definitely do not do the `Men are pigs, women are nuts' school of relationship theory." Instead, "consider a break-up the first day of the rest of your love life," Harris says. "Handle it with humor and dignity, and you'll be in good shape for the next one."

Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.