In today’s newsletter, we choose the twenty-four best books of the year. But, first, a report on the new business of breakups. Plus:
- E. Tammy Kim on an almost-coup in South Korea
- How the Syrian opposition shocked the Assad regime
- Lucy Grealy’s memoir of being seen
Jennifer Wilson
Staff writer
Earlier this summer, I had to report to my friends that the new guy I’d just been telling them about over dinner, so starry-eyed I barely touched my food, had texted me to say he just wanted to be friends. I had anticipated that the usual platitudes would roll in: “you’re too good for him,” “his loss,” “does he have a car we can key?” But one friend surprised me by asking whether I had a “breakup plan.” You mean, other than to wallow and eat carbs? No, I did not. I searched the phrase online, and found something on Etsy that looked like it was modelled on a birthing plan—except, instead of “I may want a walking epidural,” among the options to numb the pain was “start a side hustle.”
The breakup plan also advised against “stalking” your ex’s “socials,” so I stopped doing that, and I started to look deeper into this new-to-me world of breaking up better. It was populated by coaches and doulas for the recently dumped, and its landscape was dotted with heartbreak-themed spa vacations (one offered an exfoliating treatment meant to symbolize the “scrubbing away of the past”). I had fallen down a rabbit hole, or should I say a k-hole: I discovered a clinic with locations in the Midwest advertising ketamine-assisted breakup therapy and some other unnerving—literally—interventions to curtail the hurt. I was a bit freaked out. When you’re heartbroken, it feels like you’ll do anything, pay anything, to make it go away or, however improbably, to bring the person back. And now here was this burgeoning industry of pricey get-over-him getaways and move-on medicines. I wanted to find out whether there were any actual remedies in this heartbreak boomtown or if it was all just fool’s gold.
For a piece in this week’s issue, I attended a three-day “Healing from Heartbreak” workshop at Kripalu, in the Berkshires. I spent time in London with a psychologist who runs retreats at a “Heartbreak Hotel,” staffed by experts in treating P.T.S.D. I even flew to Berlin for a one-on-one session with the owner of Die Liebeskümmerer, the Heartbreak Agency, an institution that inspired a recent film of the same name featuring a freshly dumped journalist who skeptically attends a heartbreak retreat and comes out a romantic. Would life imitate art? Read or listen to the story »
In the News
The Supreme Court is hearing arguments today in a trans-rights case challenging a Tennessee law that bans gender-affirming care for minors. Chase Strangio, an attorney at the A.C.L.U., is the case’s lead lawyer and will be the first openly trans person to argue in front of the Supreme Court. “As a trans lawyer, Strangio works as a representative in every sense of the word,” M. Gessen wrote in a 2020 piece about the attorney, “in court, in the media, and sometimes in state legislatures, for his clients, for the trans community, and for himself.”
- The Best Books of 2024
- A Coup, Almost, in South Korea
- How the Syrian Opposition Shocked the Assad Regime
- Lucy Grealy Understood What It Meant to Be Seen
- Speaking Irish with Kneecap
Daily Cartoon
P.S. The Forbes 30 Under 30 lists came out yesterday, filled with accomplished young people. But what about those less aspirational among us? Bess Kalb offers a humorous list of the 30 Most Disappointing Under 30—including Joanna Feldman, twenty-two, who “misquoted E. E. Cummings in her rib-cage tattoo,” and Victor Chen, twenty-eight, who “used an app to hire a person to pick up and deliver a Chipotle burrito to him every night for twenty-two consecutive nights.” 🌯
Erin Neil contributed to this edition.
