Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours

January 29, 2016 4:41 AM

Online Feature: “Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours” by Marie-Helene Bertino She's an alien, living in our world. She observes and describes. She says amazing things. Enlightening things. Things that make you embarrassed at your own humanity. Is this how we look to the rest of the universe?

The name of the planet I’m from does not have an English equivalent. Roughly, it sounds like a cricket hopping onto a plate of rice. I am here to take notes on human beings. I fax them back to my superiors. We have fax machines on Planet Cricket Rice. They are quaint, retro things, like vintage ice cube trays.

You’re not allowed to feel bad about anything when you are around people in wheelchairs, which is why I don’t like people in wheelchairs. You can say: sometimes at night I wake up and my throat is filled with loneliness and I am choking. And they will say: I am in a wheelchair. And, they will win. They are the human pain equivalent of a royal flush. Then, I remembered that morning I had collected a heads up penny, and nothing lucky had happened to me. I felt swindled. Behind in the count. It was one of those days.


When you’re alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in a chair and get ready for it. As it moves through you, you can reach out your hands and feel all the edges. When it passes and you can drink coffee again you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend.

posted by I_Love_Bananas (19 comments total)

"A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track."
Going to read more of her work.
posted by memewit at 5:09 AM on January 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

What remarkable writing; I like it very much.

(Also, MetaFilter: I yank the tablecloth out from under the bottle of wine and candle of the conversation.)
posted by wenestvedt at 5:23 AM on January 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Oh my god thanks so much I am sobbing at my desk into my lunch
posted by citands at 5:33 AM on January 29, 2016

I am bad at telling stories.

No, you are not.

I baled when trying to read the previous post about tree farming in northern Scotland. It was so over-written, it was as clotted and hard to wade through as the bogs it described.

This is as glorious to inhale as mountain air on a clear spring day.
posted by Devonian at 5:41 AM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Maybe I slept wrong or my soul has vanished like the tablecloth, but this...whatever it is, is ridiculously annoying. The pattern of "say something seemingly deep, then say repeat it in a different way" just grates. Or they try to build relationships out of two things that have no relationship, but they're slammed together in the same way a self absorbed child slams together two wooden blocks, delighting in the sound and attention it gets from others, but really the kid is just being an asshole:

When people are late to meet me, I assume it’s because they lost track of time while planning my surprise birthday party

Go to sleep, adults are talking.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:42 AM on January 29, 2016 [8 favorites]

Hang on, this story seems to be about an alien. But actually, that's just a conceit that allows the writer to reflect on the human condition from an outside perspective! Amazing. Do other fiction writers know about this?
posted by officer_fred at 5:59 AM on January 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

It does work rather hard at being cute and clever, but it made me smile and I'm a miserable carping git.
posted by Segundus at 6:08 AM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Some really lovely writing in parts, but hollow. The "miracle" at the end would have been more compelling if it had felt somehow earned, but nothing the narrator does (which is little) suggests that it is. Having no friends is sad and can happen to anyone but it's understandable when your own inner monologue presents you as almost solipsistically lacking in empathy. I dunno, maybe it's about grace.
posted by informavore at 6:28 AM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Hang on, this story seems to be about an alien. But actually, that's just a conceit that allows the writer to reflect on the human condition from an outside perspective! Amazing. Do other fiction writers know about this?

I've been trying to write a novel for twenty years using this conceit. I think I need to try a different tack.

This style of writing is pretty common and I find it endearing and annoying a the same time. I love the phrase "Planet Chicken Rice;" I hate the word fax.
posted by kozad at 6:37 AM on January 29, 2016

Thanks -- I liked this! I liked "I wish you hadn’t asked me to build you a house" and "We have fax machines on Planet Cricket Rice" and "When you ask a human being for help, there is a chance they will say later: remember when you asked for help, can I have five dollars?" and "A roller coaster is a series of problems on a steel track" and "I seat clients who have problems and are waiting for solutions. Sometimes the person with solutions is late" and the part about the tablecloth.

(Ask Metafilter: remember when you asked for help, can I have five dollars?)

Of course it's an old schtick, the schtick of someone being funny about being sad. Kurt Vonnegut snapped right into place for me once I started looking at him as a standup comic. I guess I'm not yet tired of seeing this particular house fall on this particular Tramp?
posted by jhc at 6:41 AM on January 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I love when people write like this, except that when they do, I want them to tell more stories in between the aphorisms and metaphors, because even though I really really enjoy reading aphorisms and metaphors and similes and epigrams, especially when they are done right ("My exes do well after me. I’m like a lucky penny." That is done right), when there are too many of them and not enough story wedged in between them, it's like when kids try to make those volcanoes out of baking soda and vinegar, except there wasn't enough vinegar in the house and their mom told them to get out of the kitchen and stop wasting everything, and so the fiery magma is mostly just baking soda, and with each drop of vinegar there's a little fizz, and each individual fizz on its own is kind of satisfying but what you really wanted was so much eruption that your house would burn down and no one would ever tell you to get out of the kitchen again.

But she reminded me of what it was like cracking open the ice in those old metal ice trays, which reminded me of how I would always sneak and put my tongue on them so that it would stick (another reason I wasn't supposed to be in the kitchen), so she counts as a good writer to me, because I can always add my own stories in, I guess.
posted by mittens at 7:21 AM on January 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

AKA Martian poetry. After "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home"
(Craig Raine, 1979), which is pretty lovely.
posted by miles per flower at 7:27 AM on January 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Reminded me a bit of Aimee Bender's writing, though I think she'd have written a more precarious ending. I enjoyed this, mostly. Loved the webs of metaphors and the palpable loneliness. I especially loved, loved, loved the imagery near the end when she awakes: a confused jumble of stuff that could be used to describe an alien abduction, but it turns out to be the opposite. Nice.

The part about the people in wheelchairs threw me, though. I know the author was contrasting the invisibility of narrator's depression with the visibility of their disability, but it weirded me it out a bit.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 7:55 AM on January 29, 2016

I liked the story. I thought it was a nice story about writing. The author does a good job of capturing how it feels to be a writer and reflect on the human condition (faxing your thoughts to your off-planet superiors in this case), and the vexing existential questions that come with elevating your own authorial perspective, like am I, one person, qualified to write about the entirety of humanity? and are my thoughts worth sharing or are they typical and mundane? and will people even understand what it is that I am trying to communicate?

And if you're trying to reflect on these questions with a human protagonist then they (and therefore you) run the risk of sounding self-important and pretentious because they'd be implicitly answering them in the positive by writing in the first place, but the alien is writing not to answer these questions but because she's simply been told to take notes on human beings. So it's easier for the reader to delight in the more beautiful and apt metaphors and pass over the more 'slammed together' sounding ones, because they're from someone from the outside looking in, like how you take pleasure in a visitor's wonder, and forgive them when they break some small faux pas they didn't know existed.

But then, the whole enterprise is so fragilely held together by our suspension of disbelief, because of course the true author is not an alien at all, so why should we give her a pass for her clumsier metaphors and grating comparisons? And I think Bertino knows this and has left the rougher edges in there on purpose. She is winking at us a bit. By using this alien character she's slipped all her insight in past us without having to grapple with whether she's qualified to elevate her authorial perspective. And why should trying to have a dialogue about human truths be such a fraught endeavour, anyway? Why should we have to set out our bona fides first? She just wants to get straight into it: the last line itself is a direct invitation to reflect on everything that's come before; what she's just dumped on the table in front of us. Do we know what she means?
posted by Panthalassa at 8:00 AM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

The part about the people in wheelchairs threw me, though. I know the author was contrasting the invisibility of narrator's depression with the visibility of their disability, but it weirded me it out a bit.

This is the part that really pissed me off, as it came off as written by someone sitting in their room and thinking about who about being people in wheelchairs makes them feel as opposed to actually knowing or even talking to anyone in a wheelchair. Gratingly shallow, particularly in a story about human loneliness.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:02 AM on January 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Oh, do the inhabitants of Planet Cricket Rice also coyly talk about "boys" because, I dunno, the word "men" isn't cute enough? I thought that was unique to Earthlings. This would be a lot more interesting as a displacement of everyday things if it didn't just replace a bunch of them with adorable-indie-romantic-comedy-girl cliches.

Also, what do people who write in this style have against contractions?
posted by ostro at 10:31 AM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

In not one of those seconds did either of us get any younger.

I'm loving everything about this piece.
posted by numaner at 10:39 AM on January 29, 2016

Yeah, parts of this are good, but overall the voice doesn't work for me because it seems so innocent or uninformed in places, and in others uses a very specific (human) vernacular. I feel like this could have been a great first draft, but probably needed to have the POV defined more carefully to be more than a humor piece.
posted by newdaddy at 12:46 PM on January 29, 2016

Yeah, parts of this are good, but overall the voice doesn't work for me because it seems so innocent or uninformed in places, and in others uses a very specific (human) vernacular.

This is why I enjoyed it, actually. Despite having been a human for lo these 34 years, I actually only ever understand like 45% or so of what is happening. That 45%, though, I understand quite well, vernacular and all.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:15 PM on January 29, 2016 [2 favorites]