The Heartbreak Years: A Memoir

by Minda Honey

Overview

A hilariously intimate memoir that gets to the turbulent joys and pains of coming of age and looking for love as a Black woman in America.

In the car she’d had since high school—with the boyfriend she’d had just as long riding shotgun—Minda Honey made the cross-country drive to sunny Southern California. By the end of 2008, Obama would be president, she’d be single, and change would be upon us all.

Thousands of miles away from her family and friends in the new era of smartphones and online dating, Minda navigates the treacherous waters of early adulthood and love: confounding relationships, steamy hookups, meet-cutes, chillingly narrow escapes, and the realization that nothing plays out quite like the rom-coms she’d bet her heart on as a teenager. She was frustrated, heartbroken, resentful—and free. Kinda. From California to Colorado to her hometown in Kentucky, Minda sets out to relaunch her life outside all that defined her adolescence.

In an unflinching memoir, Minda casts her gimlet eye on her past relationships and the complicated dynamics of consent culture, gender, sexuality, race, and class. Remembering the promise and disappointments of her twenties with wisdom and compassion, this is Minda’s story of a Black woman coming into herself and changing her own world with resilience and bracing independence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781662500022
Publisher:	Amazon Publishing
Publication date:	10/01/2023
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.88(w) x 8.75(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Minda Honey’s essays on politics and relationships have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Oxford American, Teen Vogue, and Longreads. She is the editor of Black Joy at Reckon News and was director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University, an advice columnist for LEO Weekly in Louisville, Kentucky, and founder of the alt-indie publication TAUNT. Her work is featured in Burn It Down: Women Writing about Anger, A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South, and Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic. For more information visit www.mindahoney.com.

Editorial Reviews

2023-08-03
The daughter of “a Black veteran and a Filipino immigrant” reflects on her romantic history.

Growing up, Honey was obsessed with romance novels. “I fantasized about living in that serene, happily-ever-after moment when the girl and the guy in the movie have found their way back to each other,” she writes. Though the author experienced sexual assault as a teenager, she remained obsessed with finding true love. As she grew older, this need grew increasingly practical: Referring to marriage’s financial and logistical benefits, she writes, “a relationship is the cheat code to make everything else easier.” Unfortunately, she adds, “a relationship was the thing that I and most Black women knew were missing from our lives despite our many successes.” As though to confirm Honey’s fears, over the years, she weathered a series of unsuccessful romances with partners ranging from her high school boyfriend, to a man who with whom she pursued casual sex, to a man who wooed her into an emotionally intense, confusingly nonsexual relationship. By the end of the book, Honey muses, “it’s been more than a decade since my last long-term relationship….Maybe my romantic relationships are so short because, in my experience, it’s been much easier to be happy without a man than it has been to be happy with a man.” The author’s candid self-reflection illustrates the depth of her transformation, and her conflicted and at times contradictory desires add a welcome layer of complexity to an already nuanced narrative. At times, Honey seems to shy away from her most vulnerable moments. For example, she glosses over her potential alcoholism and her mother’s apparent illness, both of which leave gaps in her story. Overall, though, Honey’s witty, frank storytelling makes this book compulsively readable.

The insightful story of a Black-identified biracial woman’s search for love.

Kirkus Reviews

Honey’s witty, frank storytelling makes this book compulsively readable. The insightful story of a Black-identified biracial woman’s search for love.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A nuanced and engaging narrative of a young woman struggling through love and heartbreak.” —Booklist

“From hookups to situationships to relationships that are filled with emotional walls, Honey moves through her 20s the way most do: wildly but guarded, unable to love but desiring it.…But The Heartbreak Years is more than that. It’s about navigating the non-romantic heartbreaks of your 20s as well: the battle of working hard but not earning enough money, moving elsewhere only to back move home, feeling like an utter failure, and realizing you’re disappointing yourself but not wanting to change badly enough.” —Shondaland

“Every few decades, there’s that one book that shapes directly how we all understand the potentially radical, and radically heartbreaking, space between touching and being touched, running to and running away…Minda Honey has created a momentous piece of art, of course, but most importantly, The Heartbreak Years will teach a generation of us what’s possible when writing through, to, and beneath the pulpy inside of desire and fear.” —Kiese Laymon, bestselling author of Long Division and Heavy

“If The Heartbreak Years were a person, it’d be the girl you meet in line for the bathroom at the club. Vulnerable, hilarious, there to whisper hard-earned wisdom into your ear while holding back your hair. Minda Honey has written a fierce rallying cry for the single and lovesick, for those who dare to see the hope in being a romantic. The stories in this book are vibrant, tender, self-aware without being jaded, compulsively readable but never easy. When some f’boy has got you down, Honey’s words are an outstretched hand reaching to lift you back up.” —Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual and Alligator Tears

From the Publisher