Make It Scream, Make It Burn

by Leslie Jamison

I grew up with the sense that a broken relationship always amounted to more than its breakage. Everything that happened before it ended was not invalidated by the fact of its ending. Those memories of the relationship—the particular joys and frictions it held, the particular incarnation of self it permitted—didn’t disappear, though the world didn’t always make room for them. To speak of an ex too much was seen as a sign of some kind of pathology. The gospel of serial monogamy could have you believe that every relationship was an imperfect trial run, useful only as preparation for the relationship that finally stuck. In this model, a family full of divorces was a family full of failure. But I grew up seeing them as something else, grew up seeing every self as an accumulation of its loves, like a Russian nesting doll that held all of those relationships inside.