"LOVE IS A FOUR-LETTER WORD: True Stories of Breakups, Bad Relationships, and Broken Hearts," edited by Michael Taeckens. Plume; 296 pages; $16.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Her name was Jane.
After she dumped me — my fault, I fear — I drove past her house incessantly, to see who the other guy was. It took several weeks before I figured out that there wasn't another guy — that she would rather be alone than be with me.
I thought about Jane and my fling with profound self-abasement while reading "Love is a Four-Letter Word," a very fine anthology of original pieces about shattered love and the endless human capacity for sexual and romantic humiliation.
The writers include some familiar names — Junot Diaz, Kate Christensen, Gary Shteyngart — and a lot of unfamiliar names, primarily young writers making their move. Perhaps it's not surprising that the younger writers attack the subject with an immediacy and tactility that isn't always a feature of the more famous writers.
Of the latter, Christensen's piece probably is the best. "Shadow Dancing" involves a heavy flirtation between the 15-year-old Christensen and a 36-year-old chaperone on her high-school Spanish club's trip to Mazatlan. It's tremulous with suppressed sex, and sirens screaming DANGER!
Unusually, nothing happens.
"His lust for me had been contingent on my ability to provoke it," she writes. "It did not exist independently of my ability to bewitch him with my ambitions and attitudes and brash, fierce confidence."
The young writers include the straight, the gay, and one transsexual, but if the physical transaction is varied, the emotional experience of loss is very similar.
There's pain here, but there's also a lot of raucous laughter. Josh Kilmer-Purcell writes about a pickup who could only perform while watching repeats of "Wonder Woman." When asked why that was the case, he could only respond, "I don't know."
"It's possible I overthink things," writes Kilmer-Purcell, "but if I had that specific a fetish, I'd probably have put a little thought into its origin."
Another, slightly less exotic train wreck is nicely synopsized by its title: "Exactly like Liz Phair, Except Older, and With Hypochondria."
For me, the standout piece is by Said Sayrafiezadeh, a long reminiscence of an affair with a slightly older theater director in downtown New York that's almost Fitzgeraldian in its details of longing, of the textures of two people coming together, then coming apart from slow disillusion, all of it analyzed with the painful clarity of hindsight.
"She was a failure precisely because she thought of herself as having already achieved success. This perspective placed her in the unfortunate position of refusing work that she saw as being beneath her, while at the same time being unable to obtain work that was really above her. So she drifted in a sort of snobbish unemployed artistic limbo that she blamed on sexism."
There's an interesting generational similarity to these essays; almost all of them involve people in their 20s and 30s. That's partly a function of Michael Taeckens' slanting his selection toward younger writers, but it's also a function of the way we view ourselves and our relationships.
People in their 40s, 50s and 60s break up too, but we see ourselves differently by then. Early breakups can be chalked up to youthful naivete, and usually are; later ones tend to involve villains — not really true, but we pretend it's that way, because we no longer have the luxury of youthful naivete. Thus, the early ones are easier to laugh about in retrospect.
There are very few hard and fast rules to be gleaned from this anthology, although it's probably safe to say that people who put Strawberry Shortcake sheets on their futon are likely to be unsatisfactory partners, in sex or in life, but I think I already knew that.
This is a book for those of us who have ever eaten a gallon of ice cream all by themselves while sobbing so hard they can't see the TV; who have ever sat on a subway platform so stunned they didn't even bother getting on their train; who have ever cooled their heels in a restaurant waiting for someone who never showed up; and, God help me, for anybody who ever obsessively drove by an old lover's house for weeks on end, only to find, precisely, nothing.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: scott(underscore)eyman(at)pbpost.com.