Ten titles about breakups, heartbreak, and moving on

Liz Riggs is a writer based in Nashville. She holds an MFA in Fiction from NYU and her work has been published in The Atlantic, Bon Appétit, American Songwriter, MTV and others.

Her debut novel is Lo Fi.

At Electric Lit Riggs tagged ten books that "explore the grief of loss, the things we’ll do (often stupidly) for love, and the ways we try to move on and fail. The people or exes that we keep coming back to." One title on the list:

Green Dot by Madeline Gray

I read this book earlier this spring in about 48 hours, immediately drawn in by the classic premise: a young woman gets involved in a tumultuous affair with an older, married man (who just so happens to be one of her coworkers.) The affair between Hera and Arthur is mildly predictable in its trajectory—how could it not be?— but what holds the reader close is Gray’s smart, hilarious and wholly commanding voice. While these types of relationship stories typically have the same arc, as there is mostly only one way for them to end, Gray’s storytelling is anything but. I do not say this lightly: this book is laugh out loud funny, and I almost never laugh out loud while reading. The humor and self-awareness will make you root for Hera, even as she makes objectively terrible decisions over and over again—and then makes some more. The sex is good, the consequences are bad, the ending you already know. You should read every word of it anyway.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue