Five Men Who Broke My Heart: A Memoir

Susan Shapiro
3.39
827 ratings 110 reviews
In this honest, hilarious, fiercely intelligent memoir, journalist Susan Shapiro dares to do what every woman dreams of: track down the five men who'd broken her heart and find out what really went wrong. Between the ages of thirteen and thirty-five, Susan had plunged into love, heart-first, five times. One bad breakup was more hurtful and humiliating than the next. With insight and daring, Susan chronicles her six-month-long journey back down a road strewn with romantic regret. Although for years she'd blamed her boyfriends for their flagrant infidelity, ludicrous faults, and immature foibles, to her shock she can now suddenly pinpoint the exact moment where she herself screwed up each relationship. A successful freelance writer living in Manhattan, Susan Shapiro was in the midst of a midlife crisis she called her “no-book-no-baby summer.” Married for five years to Aaron, a workaholic TV comedy writer always on the road, she was beginning to wonder if she'd remain book- and babyless forever. Then the phone rang, and it was Brad, a college flame who'd become a Harvard scientist with a book coming out. Susan offers to interview him, and she winds up launching into all the intense, invasive questions she'd always wanted to ask him. To her surprise, he answers them! This ignites a spark that sends her on a cross-country jaunt back through her lust-littered past. While Brad is still single, she finds that Heartbreaks Number Two, Three, and Four are not. George, a theater professor, and Richard, a music biographer, are happily married with children. Tom, a handsome blond lawyer in L.A., is getting divorced. Just as it's becoming easy to worm her way back into her exes' good graces, she crashes head-on with David, a wry Canadian root canal specialist. ("It’s the equivalent of what you did to me emotionally," she tells him.) She then gut-wrenchingly relives the agony of splitting up with her first love all over again. Yet somewhere between the tantalizing what-ifs and bittersweet might-have-beens, she finds what she's been searching for all along. Part relationship manifesto, part confessional, and part valentine to the males in her life she adores, Five Men Who Broke My Heart is for anyone who has ever wondered what became of their first love. Or second, third, fourth, or fifth…
Genres: MemoirNonfictionBiographyBiography MemoirRelationshipsHumorAutobiographyChick LitRomanceWomens
240 Pages

Community Reviews:

5 star
148 (18%)
4 star
232 (28%)
3 star
281 (34%)
2 star
125 (15%)
1 star
41 (5%)

Readers also enjoyed

Other books by Susan Shapiro

Lists with this book

The Diary of a Young Girl
Catch-22
The Chosen
The Best of Jewish Authors
728 books • 192 voters
Fifth Chinese Daughter
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties
The Ear of the Heart: An Actress' Journey from Hollywood to Holy Vows
The Diary of a Young Girl
Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History
The Chosen
Best Jewish Books
394 books • 115 voters