What to Do … When You Get Dumped – a guide to unbreaking your heart (… When I’m Gone: A Mother’s Wisdom to Her Daughter)

by Liz Argall

Summary

What to Do When You Get Dumped – a guide to unbreaking your heart, is the second collaboration of the mother daughter team, Suzy Hopkins and Hallie Bateman. Talented story tellers in their own rights (Hopkins a journalist and Bateman a celebrated cartoonist and illustrator) they first collaborated on the book What to Do When I’m Gone: A Mother’s Wisdom to Her Daughter.

In What to Do When I’m Gone, published in 2018, Hopkins provides recipes, for life and food for getting through life one day at a time after your mother dies. It starts at day one and follows all the vicissitudes of grief, living and aging up to 20,000 days (54 years). It provides pieces of advice for different milestones in life where it might be nice to ask for a mother’s advice, such as whether to get married, stresses about having children or when to consider leaving a relationship.

My mother died when I was 21, so I’ve never had most of the mother/daughter conversations referred to in this book, but I can attest that it is sound advice and a warm-hearted read. It is a little odd reading it, knowing what comes next, however. And not just because on Page 125 it’s prophetic when it says, “Absent of nuclear war or global pandemic, you are in a more privileged position than any generation in history.”.… tell me a book was published before 2020 without telling me a book was published before 2020. In it you can read about how long relationships can evolve and cool over time… and I must confess, uses some of the language that I’ve heard friends use prior to divorce! I’ve also heard relationships—perfectly happy relationships—use this language, but with the benefit of hindsight there is a certain foreboding to it.

While What to Do When I’m Gone was a counting the days, counting up after the loss of a mother, What to Do When You Get Dumped reverses the script. What to Do When You Get Dumped it starts at 1,582 days (4.3 years) and counts down from totally broken heart to a heart that heals.

I love seeing how an artist or writer’s voice matures and evolves over time, and with What to Do When You Get Dumped we experience this twofold, which is both a delight and a little poignant. The authorial and artistic voices have been sharpened, deepened and take us in a journey that is funny, moving and intimate.

At the end of What to do When I’m Gone we conclude with a kind, motherly reflections on aging with grace and gentleness. The infinite river of life and memories carrying us forward and on.

What to Do When You Get Dumped opens on Hopkins world shattering. The water of life is now a shattered dam with everything thrown into the air. It starts with panicking, sobbing on the bathroom floor (depicted in a way that is straight forward, and with a wry humor). We know the protagonist (Hopkins) has been dumped, but we don’t know the details, not for several days which is fitting, given the all-consuming nature of panic and loss.

What to Do When You Get Dumped builds on the recipe and instruction guide nature of What to Do When I’m Gone and takes it to a new level of excellence. It draws the blinds back on what we might pretend grief looks like, and luxuriates in and normalizes the snotty nosed weirdness of loss. It’s so much more interesting than Instagram perfection.

Day one of the heart break (1,582 days) the instructions are to panic. Day two (1,581 days), keep panicking (but also, make a to do list). Day three (1580 days until the heart is healed), cue the montage, normalizing all the thoughts you can torture yourself with when you find out your husband was having an affair and has dumped you to be with them.

As Hopkins gets through, day by day, and then week by week (the countdown to healing speeds up over time), we discover that as Hopkins was on her way to her last day of work, two days from going on a long-planned holiday to celebrate her retirement, her husband of thirty years, dumped her. He picks a time when she is rushing out to work and about to lose all supporting structure from the routine of work to tell her that he’s back together with an old flame.

Hopkins creates a funny, brilliant and practical guide for folks going through a divorce and for friends’ of people going through a divorce. It definitely gave me a few moments of “noted, better avoid being a sympathetic dickhead, as I could totally do X in a well-intentioned way!”

Hopkins and Bateman do a wonderful job of inviting us into a long dark teatime of the soul with good humor and grace.

What to Do When You Get Dumped, Page 14

In What to Do When You Get Dumped, Grief mixes the mundane (how do I cook for one?) with the metaphysical (what is the point of existence anyway?) … the all to visceral with the quietly numbing. Navigating these contradictions is part of what makes peer support so valuable.

What to Do When You Get Dumped, Page 33

Sure, you can have an academic description about theories of grief, endocrine functions and the way the brain processes memory, but the map is not the territory. It is powerful to see the viscera, humanity and contradictions of this journey. Perhaps, most importantly, we want to see that others have been through similar experiences of loss (that parts of it were really weird) and they have survived. Hope, hope is one of the most powerful medicines of them all.

What to Do When You Get Dumped, Page 39

Hopkins and Bateman demonstrate how post traumatic growth happens. It can be an ugly looking creature, with many ups and downs, uncertainties and a wish it really wasn’t necessary, but it is real.

What to Do When You Get Dumped, Page 75

What to Do When You Get Dumped, Page 119

I recommend this for anyone that wouldn’t mind a little laughter in the face of grief. If you study comics, academically or as a craftsman, I highly recommend you buy both books. They’re both good reads, and it’s great to see how artist’s voices can grow and deepen. It shows the value of the work, and how What to Do When You Get Dumped would not exist without What to Do When I’m Gone coming first. And I’ve very glad it exists.

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Liz Argall’s work has appeared in multiple outlets, including Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Meanjin, and Antipodes; A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature. She contributed to multiple roleplaying games, including Geist 2nd Edition and 13th Age, and is a strong proponent of the healing power of play. You can find out more at her website https://lizargall.com/.  Liz lives in Seattle, but her heart misses the big silly birds of Australia.