When Suzy Hopkins’s husband of 30 years announced that he’d fallen in love with his former girlfriend, who worked as a marriage therapist, Hopkins was stunned. “His departure was so sudden,” she recalls. “The marriage was just done.”
She called her adult children, and daughter Hallie Bateman hopped in the car. “I drove up to be with her, because between my brothers and me, I have no day job, so I was like, I will come see you,” she says. Bateman works as an illustrator—her work has appeared in The New Yorker and she’s illustrated several books—while Hopkins was two days from retiring from her job as a regional magazine publisher in northern California.
The two had always been close, and they’d even collaborated on the popular and critically acclaimed graphic novel about maternal love and anticipatory grief, What to Do When I’m Gone (Bloomsbury, 2018). Now, six years later, they’ve collaborated again, offering a graphic account of what happened to Hopkins in the years after the fateful day of the dumping—tracing her long path through disbelief, shock, and depression and very slowly into understanding and healing. Their new book, What to Do When You Get Dumped, releases next week (also from Bloomsbury), and the mother/daughter duo, both of whom now live in Cincinnati, will launch the book with an event Tuesday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.
For such a heavy and honest book, What to Do When You Get Dumped is also funny. It’s written as a guide for others experiencing traumatic break-ups with lots of specifics from Hopkins’s own experiences—right down to the countdown of days toward healing that appear in the corners of each page. (Spoiler alert: It’s a lot of days.) From a harrowing rollercoaster called “Cupid’s Revenge” that traces her whiplash in various gut-wrenching moments after her divorce (including her sister saying of the new girlfriend, whom Hopkins refers to as Y in the memoir, She looks like you) to a bullet train called “Heartbreak Express” that zooms across the page, the memoir strikes a very real but also extremely supportive note.
Next to Bateman’s drawing of the moving train, which is packed with wailing passengers, including one woman clutching a teddy bear, Hopkins writes, “Keep in mind that although you feel like its only passenger, the pain train is actually packed. People the world over get dumped, multitudes everyday.”
The written excerpts are short and, in combination with Bateman’s visuals, inspire lingering, remembering, sharing, and catharsis. After the breakup, Hopkins recalls that she wanted resources to help, something that would be real about the pain but also communicate, You will be OK. The closest thing that she found were books about grief. “This book is the note to myself that I needed,” she says now. “If it just helps one person feel less alone, I would be satisfied.”
One of the things that Hopkins, a lifelong journalist, did after she being dumped was to ask friends if they knew anyone who had experienced a horrible break-up. She ended up interviewing six strangers, with each interview lasting around two hours; each person cried during their interview. “I realized that these things just take a long time to get over,” she says, “and that’s when I said, Oh, I’m not the slowest person in the world to recover. This just takes much longer than people think it does. That was my insight.”
Hopkins’s informants about heartbreak appear in the book on a single page, along with the recommendation for readers to “find fellowship” and to ask other people “how they survived.” In this book, she is herself that stranger for the reader—someone who generously relates the honest experience of what happened and offers heartbreakingly personal tidbits, such as the first time she saw her ex after the breakup and he said to her, voice emotional, God, I miss the dogs, completely insensitive to the utter devastation he’d caused her.
For Bateman, working on this story of her parents’ divorce was incredibly difficult but also healing. “The experience for me was just the honor of being a part of this important synthesis of all of this grief and information,” she says. “It was incredibly healing for me as well.”
Beyond the book itself, one thing Bateman takes away is an appreciation for what happens when life goes horribly sideways. “I have an example of how you can get through something that is very shitty and takes you by surprise and not bury it or weaponize it,” she says.
In the book’s acknowledgement section, Bateman wrote directly to her mom, “You are the classy, brilliant Suzy Hopkins. So of course you took your pain, felt it deeply, healed it slowly, and wove your story into something poignant and funny and deeply generous.” And it seems like Bateman is well on her way of following in her mother’s footsteps.
When she found out she was having twins, an occasion that precipitated the family’s move from California to Ohio, her first move sounded familiar: She called five mothers of twins and asked them to share their stories.
Hallie Bateman and Suzy Hopkins launch their book at Joseph-Beth Booksellers at 7 p.m. January 21. They will be in conversation with poet Jacqueline Suskin.
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