What’s Up With the Title?

The title of Why We Broke Up is pretty self-explanatory. The whole book is Min processing what went wrong between her and her ex-boyfriend, Ed Slaterton—you know, explaining why they broke up.

As a love story, it's backward insofar as the beginning is the end, so to speak. From the first page, we get that Min's telling the story from the vantage point of five weeks post-breakup. "It's December now, and the sky is bright, and it's clear to me," she writes. "I'm telling you why we broke up, Ed. I'm writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is I goddamn loved you so much" (1.2). Instead of waiting to see whether they get together, then, in this book, we're waiting to see why they broke up. And Min delivers in spades.