Meyer The End of Romance

A charmingly funny and painfully relatable anti-romcom
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-0-85730-955-6
Verlag: Verve Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 320 Seiten

A big-hearted novel about a woman who theorises that happiness is possible solely with the eradication of all romance - only to find a love that could change her life forever...

After escaping a suffocating marriage to her abusive childhood sweetheart, Sylvie Broder decides she is done with love. She returns to graduate school and sets out to prove that, for a straight woman to be truly happy, she must separate love from sex and give up on all pursuits of romance.

Driven by PhD research, relationship trauma and pride, Sylvie's new philosophy seems set to stick. Until Robbie comes along. And then Abie... Finding herself falling in love - not once, but twice - Sylvie must make a decision: to be brave and let this love in, or to choose her research and burn everything else to the ground.

Deeply relatable and utterly compelling, The End of Romance is an anti-romcom for anyone who, despite their very best efforts, has fallen in love and wondered why. It's perfect for fans of Curtis Sittenfeld, Miranda July and Miranda Cowley Heller.

'If Grace Paley and Miranda July had a baby, the result would be The End of Romance. Hilarious, off-kilter, sparklingly special, deliciously Jew-ish and disarmingly deep, this book made me feel 10 percent less dead inside' - Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of Housemate

'Meyer so beautifully captures the cumulative effect all of our past relationships (romantic and otherwise) have on us... She's crafted an unforgettable cast of characters' - Katie Yee, author of Maggie

'Meyer has created a funny, relatable and empathetic protagonist... The End of Romance is a brainy, highly original anti-romance romance' - Susan Coll, author of Acceptance

'Gripping and incisive... You root for Sylvie at every turn... Meyer has created a woman I learned from, suffered with and, now that I've finished this terrific novel, miss terribly' - Adam Ross, author of Playworld

'A sly subversion and exemplar of the [romance] form... Its irrepressible protagonist, Sylvie Broder, a spiritual heiress to Judy Blume characters' - New York Times

'The anti-rom rom-com of the year... Heart-warming and thought-provoking... A romance built for our modern age' - LitHub

'Sharp and sexy... This thought-provoking novel pulls off big ideas and steamy romance all at once' - Publishers Weekly

'A compulsively readable, whip-smart, moving novel' - BOMB

'Meyer's prose is both graceful and skillful. A charming and complex book full of intellect, humor, and - despite its title - romance' - Kirkus

This novel contains depictions of emotional abuse and a reference to suicide.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Meyer, Lily

Leseproben

Chapter Two

1

Sylvie did not take her phone when she left Marblehead. She didn’t leave Jonah a note. She threw her grandparents’ bougainvillea painting into her car and drove straight to Hallie’s house in Baltimore, where her friend let her in without hesitation. She said she’d been waiting for this day. She had, it turned out, a lot to say about Sylvie. Apparently, she’d clocked Sylvie’s depression years ago, and the unhealthiness of her relationship years before that.

‘It was textbook,’ Hallie said, by which she meant it met the criteria of psychological abuse she’d learned in undergrad.

Out of gratitude, Sylvie tried to be the practice patient Hallie so clearly wanted, but she couldn’t bear to be diagnosed. Nor was she eager to discuss her emotions, her errors, the insecurity and solipsism that had delivered her to this point. She just wanted to enjoy the ringing quiet of her head without Jonah constantly in it. She conjured his voice daily, of course – hourly; sometimes, it seemed, every minute – but imagining what he’d say if he found her wasn’t the same as hearing his pity and scorn.

After two weeks, she told Hallie she needed some time alone. Hallie said that as long as Sylvie wasn’t isolating herself, she thought getting a place was a healthy next step. Sylvie thanked her until both girls cried, then started answering Craigslist ads. Within days, she had found a room in a group house, bought the cheapest little square of a phone on the market, and sold both her engagement ring and the Civic, which was registered to Jonah, to a transparently criminal man in the Baltimore suburbs. She called her parents, finally, and was astonished when her mother, rather than scolding, asked, ‘Do you need money?’

‘I’m all right.’

Paul, on the other line, issued a soft grumble. Sylvie could imagine him in his study, her mother in the living room, uniting without providing each other comfort. ‘We’re going to send you some,’ he said.

‘Just this once,’ Carol added sternly, as if Sylvie were insisting. ‘I hope you didn’t close your bank account from college.’

‘No.’ Sylvie knew the money was proof of love, of acceptance. She had expected no such thing. ‘It’s still there. Thank you.’

Between that, the car-and-ring cash, and her savings from the harbor, she could have made it months without a job, but emotionally, that was a non-option. Among the easier lessons Sylvie had learned from Swampscott was that her emotional state deteriorated when she wasn’t employed, and so she found herself part-time work at a museum gift shop, a Pottery Barn, and the kind of wine store that sells $17 containers of almonds and set about making a life.

Sylvie saw Hallie once a month. She wrote Rachel a long apology that led to, if not renewed friendship, a form of intermittent communication – meals when Rachel visited Hallie, text-message catch-ups on birthdays, an occasional thinking of you – that made her feel better. She learned how to ignore the emails Jonah sent to the address that she, out of spite, refused to change, and how to pick men up fast and get rid of them faster. Everything was easier and more fun, it turned out, if you stopped waiting for people to love you. If you simply refused to let them, it got easier still.

After a year, she swapped the group house for an apartment with only one roommate, a woman named Corinne, who had enough friends not to need Sylvie, but not so many she wasn’t sometimes around to go trawl bars for men or watch an old movie or an episode of The Sopranos on a rainy afternoon. Tony and Carmela were among Sylvie’s major companions by then, along with the contents of her neighborhood library’s philosophy section. Rereading The Sickness Unto Death was strangely soothing – more so, certainly, than the romance novels that Sylvie now thought she would never touch again. She’d tried one, and it was a stinging reminder of what an idiot she’d been. As she made her way from comforting old European men to the feminists she’d read about in Swampscott, it occurred to her, as it had occurred to countless women before her, that, in fact, she’d been fooled. By Jonah, yes, but also by a bad system. She was no different from Carmela Soprano. She’d been hoodwinked by patriarchy.

A thought like that could lead a person to lesbianism, or activism, or any number of -isms. For Sylvie, it led to the classroom. During her second year in Corinne’s apartment – they celebrated their anniversary as roommates with Chinese food and a cake – she applied to Johns Hopkins for a master’s in philosophy. Only after she’d been accepted and taken out loans did she remember that Jonah had insisted she liked studying, not school. All summer, she worried that he’d turn out to be right; that he’d understood her more than she currently chose to believe.

He hadn’t. He was full of shit. From the moment she started classes, in September 2014, she was consumed by the fun of turning other people’s ideas into her own. She had, in her fallow years, developed a distinct intellectual taste. She wasn’t interested in the analytic and linguistic philosophy that occupied the majority of her professors and peers. Nor did she care about metaphysics. She thought it was essentially recreational – by which she meant masturbatory – to occupy oneself with big, floaty questions like the mind-body problem, which, incidentally, she found easy to resolve: her mind was both in her body and of it, distinct but not free. Descartes had said so centuries ago. Agreeing with him made no difference to her life, and what she cared about was philosophy that could.

She settled into reading and writing about a mix of feminist politics, queer theory, and old-school moral philosophy that her adviser said was intriguing, unusual, even contrarian. Most philosophy grad students used mathematical proofs to wrangle questions like Is the self real? or What does the word maybe mean? Sylvie’s question was much simpler. She wanted to know how a straight woman could be free.

She graduated without an answer, but with a spot in a philosophy PhD program at the University of Virginia. She started in August 2016. Her drive from Baltimore to Charlottesville was heavy with Trump signs. She tried to ignore them, as she tried to ignore Donald Trump, who she found viscerally sickening. She saw flashes of Jonah in the candidate’s repulsive, misogynistic insistence on himself. Grandpa Ilya would have been campaigning against him daily. All Sylvie did was tell herself he couldn’t win.

Anyway, she was busy that fall. She was, first of all, fighting a war with the University of Virginia to keep her name off its websites. She’d had to do the same at Johns Hopkins – invoke Title IX, abase herself to male administrators. It was a mortifying experience, but here she at least had the help of the graduate program manager, Isabella Kwan, who from her desk in the department’s front office steered the fates of professors who hardly noticed her existence. No professors asked who it was that Sylvie had to be hidden from. Isabella did. Sylvie could hardly bring herself to tell her story, but doing so, and showing Isabella the emails Jonah continued to send, was worthwhile. Isabella strategized with her. She coached her through her paperwork. She made the suggestion that eventually became the university’s safety plan for Sylvie: not for her to be omitted from the program’s site, as had happened at Johns Hopkins, but for her to appear with neither a photo nor a first name. In the University of Virginia’s online directory and live course catalog, she was simply Professor Broder, an androgynous cipher with no estranged husband to come looking for her.

Sylvie felt it should not have come as any great surprise to her professors that she had a husband to hide from. She didn’t do autobiography, but in the paper she’d submitted with her application, she had outlined her nascent theory of the end of romance, which she proposed to expand into a dissertation. It was Sylvie’s belief, after two years of a master’s and four of not living with Jonah, that not only marriage but any public or public-inspired performance of relationships or sexuality – any romance – at once kept women from flourishing and corroded true love.

If she were willing to write about her own life, she could have used it as grounding for her arguments. Instead, she began with Hegel’s Reason in History. In it, Hegel argued that progress began when people realized they could be free. Sylvie wasn’t sure she agreed completely – she was no Civil War expert, but it didn’t take a historian to know that enslaved African Americans realized they could be free long, long before the federal government got with the program – but where heterosexual love was concerned, Sylvie thought he was absolutely right.

She also grounded her argument in Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, which condemned sex discourse. Foucault thought public conversations about sex created social...