The Book That Broke My Heart
Long before Taylor Swift became famous chronicling her breakups, I filled hundreds of looseleaf notebooks with my sordid love traumas. When I married at 35, instead of saying “Mazel tov,” my conservative Midwest Jewish father yelled “Hallelujah.” Though my curly-haired husband was a fellow Manhattan freelancer and writing teacher, it turned out we were compatible in all ways but fertility.
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Five years later, while he was on an extended business trip, I had lunch with a hunky college ex who was in town. That intense hour-long reunion inspired a humorous memoir pitched as: a 40-year-old married woman fighting infertility goes back to re-meet her worst heartbreaks of all time. She wants to find out what really went wrong and whether she’d wound up wed to the right person.
After two decades of professional rejections, the best moment of my life arrived when a sharp female agent from my Michigan hometown sold Five Men Who Broke My Heart to Random House. It was launched Valentine’s Day in 2004. At 43, I convinced myself that I’d rather have books than babies. But not everyone appreciated my provocative rom-com. My husband threatened to pen a rebuttal titled “The Bitch Beside Me.” My father trashed me for “running naked through the streets, humiliating your family.”
I felt demoralized. My therapist helped me realize “they are not your audience.” Miraculously, the first Publishers Weekly review called it a funny, heartfelt “delightfully kaleidoscopic autobiography of an impulsive and passionate woman who comes of age with style.” My enthusiastic publicists booked me on The Today Show and NPR. I imagined this would be my long-awaited breakout bestselling hit. It was not.
Doing advance press, I foolishly revealed to a New York Post editor that we’d given the New York Times Style section an exclusive first interview. The annoyed Post editor then ran a nasty tear-down piece mocking the mention of bodily fluids in the book’s fertility scene as “TMI.” It was mortifying. Friends said nobody would notice.
Everybody noticed. The Today Show and NPR immediately canceled my spots—proving not all press is good press. After much begging from the V.P. of publicity, The Today Show luckily rescheduled weeks later, not so NPR. Then a Washington Post book critic who didn’t love it sniffed that my book was like “Bridget Jones for the married set.” I was crushed—although my publicist later used it as a blurb for the paperback cover.
I tried to get my parents on board, touched they flew in for the launch party. Yet walking in, they huddled in the corner with relatives who whispered, “How are you holding up?” as if they’d come to sit shiva.
Alas, my book did not fly off the shelves. Happily, a second chance for immortality came when it was optioned by Paramount Pictures. I envisioned which female star would play me: Julia Roberts? Jennifer Aniston? Julianna Marguiles? The project kept stalling. Meanwhile another female memoirist chronicling heartbreak launched Eat Pray Love with my publisher. Hers sold 12 million copies, was translated into 30 languages, and made into a hit movie starring Julia Roberts. It depicted the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, divorcing her husband and finding a new Brazilian love in Indonesia. I’d rather keep my original spouse in New York, I consoled myself, holding onto my fantasy of getting a screen version.
Check out Susan Shapiro’s Five Men Who Broke My Heart here:
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Yet year after year each celebrity doppelganger aged out of the 40-year-old heroine who never made it to celluloid. Since my husband was a brilliant TV/film scribe who taught scriptwriting by night, I coerced him to co-author the screenplay with me—despite the fact that he detested the book’s plot and his character. This led to bizarre screaming matches.
“There’s no story here if she doesn’t screw someone else,” he yelled of the heroine (who was me). “A movie plot can’t revolve around a feminist having a deep internal realization.”
Because I’d only undressed myself emotionally—not physically—for the exes in the book (and in reality) I disagreed. He feared continuing to collaborate would ruin the union at the center of my story and world. Luckily, it was re-optioned, landing the perfect feminist TV writer. Hearing she’d also grown up Jewish as a suburban doctor’s daughter with a graduate creative writing degree and moved to the Big Apple, I overidentified. Alas, no good script was ever handed in. Her next credit? HBO’s wildly successful award-winning “The Affair,” about a woman who screws a married man and destroys his family. As a career move, should I have fled monogamy to fall onto another’s mattress? It was painful to think my prudishness doomed my project.
“Look, each book will break your heart in a different way,” my cousin, the late author Howard Fast, once warned. I doubted that, as several of his historical novels—like Freedom Road, April Morning, The Immigrants, and Spartacus—were bestsellers that made it to the screen. Yet he’d had to self-publish Spartacus in 1951 after no publisher would take it on, he told me, because he was blacklisted as a Communist. Dalton Trumbo was credited with the screenplay for the award-winning movie, not him. It wasn’t until 1991 that Simon & Schuster issued a paperback version of Spartacus with Fast’s intro explaining the 40-year delay. “Sometimes good things come to those who wait.”
“What about Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying? That’s the opposite of heartbreak—and waiting,” I told Fast, citing the sexy 1973 debut novel by Jong, Fast’s daughter-in-law at the time, about leaving her husband to search for something “zipless.” It was an instant international hit that sold over 37 million copies in 45 languages.
“But the book she wrote at age 31 will eclipse everything else she ever writes,” Fast
argued. “That’s the worst heartbreak of all.”
I understood what he meant since she went on to publish many other hardcovers and two Fear of Flying sequels that never quite equaled the original’s acclaim.
Still, I’d die for one 37th of her sales numbers. I tried not to compare myself to more famous authors. But I complained to my therapist that I was especially jealous of protégés I’d mentored who’d landed $500,000 book deals that became mega-hits. Several dwarfed my five-figure advance and the only royalties I’d received for the Brazilian edition (which had sold for $1,000.)
“You’re much better off this way,” my shrink insisted, explaining that huge financial windfalls were often destabilizing. While my publishing dream came true and my marriage thrived, it was healthier that I’d have to keep doing books by day and teaching by night. He also felt that helping the younger generation conquer the literary world brought me good karma. Reminding me of Freud’s two life forces, he added, “Your goal should be achieving longevity in both work and love.”
Celebrating my memoir’s 20th anniversary this week, I see his point and the upsides. Writing turned my worst experiences into the most beautiful, an equation that inspired countless classes. After fixing up my Random House editor with a former student of my husband’s, we danced at their wedding; so buying my memoir on heartbreaks healed hers. The four of us appeared on a fun reality TV dating show together which led to another book, one of a series my parents couldn’t stand, inspiring the rule I share with all my undergrads and graduates: “The first pages you write that your family hates means you’ve found your voice.”
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Through a beloved ex-student of mine, Five Men was recently re-optioned by a well-known feminist producer. And my debut may have actually set one record: a Bookbub special that reduced the price of the Kindle version to $1.99 made it an e-book bestseller in 2017, 13 years after its pub date. I’m immensely grateful it’s still in print, as am I.