Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me

 
 
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki
art by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell
First Second
2019

 

 

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me  is a graphic novel about a teenage lesbian's emotional journey to finally be the one to break up with her pretty but inconsistent girlfriend.

 
Freddy is Asian-American and has a White father. She lives in present-day California, and has a racially diverse, all-queer friend group. In addition to watching the story unfold, we also get a kind of voice-over narration as Freddy writes several emails to an online advice columnist, and at the end, as the columnist writes back.

 
The story opens at a high school Valentine's Day dance. Freddy is there with her friends. Laura Dean shows up late, sweeps Freddy off her feet for a few dances, then disappears, until Freddy finds her making out with another girl in an empty classroom. Later, Laura breaks up with Freddy by text. They stay broken up for a week, until Laura suggests they get back together, and Freddy agrees. This is the third time this has happened, hence the title.

 
While they're broken up, Freddy is miserable, despite her friends' attempts to help her, but when they get back together, she becomes a bad friend in other ways, skipping out on her friends on short notice whenever Laura texts. The person who suffers the most from this is Doodle, who obviously has a crush on Freddy, and is also going through something difficult in secret, and really needs her friend's support. Eventually Freddy learns the self-respect she needs to break up with Laura, and at prom, we see her and Doodle dancing together.

 
Rosemary Valero-O'Connell's art is pretty. It's black outlines on white, with a couple shades of grey and one shade of pink used as accent colors. This style of having a single accent color, used artistically rather than for symbolic meaning, is something I've now seen a few times in recent comics.

 
I think this one would actually be appropriate for teenagers. It also won an ALA award for excellent YA literature. We see some kissing, and a few panels of Freddy and Laura lying on top of a bed in tshirts and boxer shorts, but this is a story about emotions, mostly. We also hear a reference to the existence of heterosexual sex, that there are such things as condoms, that they can break, and pregnancy can result.
 

Although all the characters are queer, what we see them struggle with is not understanding what their identities or sexualities are, but rather, what to do with them, with universal questions about what you deserve from a relationship, or how to balance your partner and your friends.