Five Men Who Broke My Heart [Paperback]

Susan Shapiro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 2004

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…

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A delightfully kaleidoscopic autobiography of an impulsive and passionate woman who comes of age with style.... Shapiro’s often funny and always heartfelt recollections of past relationships are so entertaining, it’s a shame she doesn’t have an endless supply of material."
—Publishers Weekly


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

On sale 1/20/04! 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?


From the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Delta (October 26, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385337795
• ISBN-13: 978-0385337793
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #246,433 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book made we realize I am not alone, March 18, 2005

By 

Catherine M. Smith (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five Men Who Broke My Heart (Paperback)

I enjoyed this book so much I could not put it down. It made me realize I am not alone in this crazy world of relationships. It has inspired me to look at my own past realtionships and move on and to look around at the people in my life now and appreciate them. I would highly recommend this book to evryone!!!

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ever found yourself thinking "what if" about past relationships?, July 6, 2005

By 

Dan "Longsword" (USA, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five Men Who Broke My Heart (Paperback)

Have you ever thought about the ones that got away? Ever found yourself thinking "what if" about past relationships?

Journalist Susan Shapiro has. In fact, she wrote a book about it.

In the midst of a midlife crisis on the brink of her 40th birthday, she found herself a frustrated novelist and wannabe mother with a completed manuscript that publishers kept rejecting, married to a workaholic comedy writer who travelled a lot and is unable to father the child she thought she wanted.

And the "spark" had gone out of their marriage.

Feeling insecure, she perked up when she heard from an ex-boyfriend named Brad. "I hadn't seen Brad in ten years," she divulges in anticipation of their reunion. "In ten minutes he was coming back to see me. Not to say `I'm sorry,' `I can't forget you,' or better yet, `No woman has ever been able to replace you.'" The real reason Brad, now a professor at Harvard, had sought her out was because he wanted her to interview him about his upcoming book for one of the publications she wrote for.

But still, she decided to take advantage of the opportunity to ask Brad some questions about where their relationship had gone wrong.

She fell, reluctantly, for Brad when she was 16 and attending college, because he reminded her of the "fierce rivalry" she had experienced while growing up with three brothers. Although the relationship had ended with college, the butterflies that appeared in her stomach prior to their recent reunion told her that she'd never really gotten over him.

With her biological clock ticking menacingly, she thought, "If I'd married Brad, I'd have children by now, but we'd surely be divorced. If I was single, I could have his baby without marriage." But then "$20,000 worth of therapy kicked in.... [She] still hated him."

She spends the remainder of the book reanalyzing this and other past relationships.

Meeting with Tom, another old flame from college, made her reflective of "How strong-minded, brave, and sure of everything" she was in her 20s. "I was jealous of my old self, she says."

Also among the ex files are George, now also a college professor, and Richard, a writer who was less than pleased by a vicious comment she had made about him in a magazine article she had written after their breakup.

Her fifth ex, David, is now a dentist in Toronto. When she started her search for him, she found eight phone listings for dentists by that name. "There was one problem," though, she writes. "I forgot how polite Canadians were. For three days, it rained David Greens. All eight returned my call, none was him [sic]. They sounded nice. I felt bad, like I was disappointing them. Yet it was almost fun, as if rejecting eight David Greens could atone for the horrendous way my David Green had left me."

When she finally tracked him down through a mutual friend, she learned he felt the same way. His response to her e-mail request for a meeting, in part, was "I would rather take out my appendix with a bottle of Jack and a dull spoon."

Her journey into the past sometimes led to self-revelation, as in, "The man who I feared didn't think I was smart enough was my father. That might be why I had the idea to see my exes now." "...I needed absolution from all my father figures." She also briefly explores her relationship with her mother, whose response is "No, you're acting like you're 15 again."

Strangely enough, it is her husband Aaron, whose credits include Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld, who evokes the most sympathy. Despite the fact that she criticizes him for doing things too slowly, for instance, his rebuttal is "There's a Zen saying I like, `When late, walk slower.'"

If you can overlook the frequent references to drug use that sometimes make it seem Shapiro wants to be the poster child for marijuana legalization, her story is interesting enough. Take this one to the beach this summer and let someone else muse about the past for you.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must-read, June 17, 2006

By 

L.J. Pollane - See all my reviews

This review is from: Five Men Who Broke My Heart (Paperback)

Joan Rivers was right: Susan Shapiro IS hysterical. And she's an absolutely wonderful writer. In FIVE MEN WHO BROKE MY HEART, Shapiro pulls off the rare feat of entertaining the reader and imparting deep information at the same time. Of course this book has juicy details, just as the title promises. But it satisfies on a deeper level as well. The writer knows so much about relationships between men and women, and she's willing to share what she knows. She doesn't just tell the stories of her failed relationships with men; she describes her gradual transformation from girl to woman. It's not often that a writer is so obviously truthful in a memoir...Shapiro tells us everything we want to know about relationships, even when the truth doesn't reflect well on her. After reading FIVE MEN WHO BROKE MY HEART, I want to read everything Susan Shapiro has written. Hers is a voice that's smart and funny--it's a voice that I trust.