The subject of the book is love. How to get over it.
And the book is selling well. In the basement of Sam Weller's Salt Lake bookstore, a good-sized crowd gathers to meet the author, Debby Bull. Bull reads a few excerpts from "Blue Jelly." The audience laughs because the book is funny, even though it's about heartbreak.Then there is a chance to ask questions. People ask about publishing and writing and what Bull is working on now.
Eventually, a woman in the front row is compelled to ask about love. Exactly how long did it take for Bull to get over her broken heart? "It took longer than I wanted it to," the author responds. "How long?" the woman asks again. "Well it wasn't really one break-up. So many different people had left me." "Did it take 6 months or 5 years?" asks the woman. The specifics seem vital.
"Somewhere between 6 months and 5 years," answers Bull. She adds, kindly, that when she was trying to get over love it didn't help to hear about how long it might take.
The woman in the front row doesn't seem satisfied. It may be that the woman in the front row is herself recovering from lost love. Or is planning on having to recover soon.
There are so many loves that turn out not to be The Love. She may be hoping to hear it will be just a few more weeks until joy sneaks back into her heart. She may have come to the reading hoping to learn to fall out of love easily.
There are many places to go for help. If she wanted to meet people who fall in and out of love often, she should consult the college-aged. They are fast skiers, enthusiastic rollerbladers. In love, as in all things, they are masters of speed and endurance.
To learn to lose love gracefully, one might also consult Miss Manners.
However, if you seek a poetic recognition of pain - along with a recipe for cinnamon prune marmalade - look no further than the book "Blue Jelly."
When it comes to love and depression, Bull admits, "I've lost many more rounds than I've won." During these bleak moments, Bull finds self-help books too styleless to read. Real literature makes her cry. In "Blue Jelly," she wrote the book she herself needed. It is a book with 16 upbeat canning recipes and a simple premise: Keep your hands busy and your heart will heal.
Bull discovered the curative powers of canning quite by accident. She was in the middle of throwing a party in honor of her boyfriend's career success, when he called to say he wouldn't be there. He'd fallen in love with someone else.
In the process of getting rid of everything he'd ever given her, she came across some huckleberries he'd left in her freezer. She decided to make jelly. She didn't stop with jelly. She went on to pickles and marinated mushrooms and apple butter.
In the midst of her love disappointment, Bull had a job disappointment. So she picked dandelions and made more jelly and when she ran out of the yellow food coloring the recipe called for, she used blue. She refused to give up. She kept canning for months. She kept canning until she was happy again.
Bull writes, Canning may sound like a strange path out of the dark woods of despair, but all the other ways, from Prozac to suicide, are really hard on your body. And therapy - breathing new life into the story every week - doesn't always help. When you are really depressed, you have to do something to take you out of the drama, that makes you detach from the world and become king of a tiny controllable world, like one of berries and Ball jars. . .
Canning requires that you get out of your head. It's a Zen thing. You cannot be wondering about your inadequacies and how they drove Bob off and be making jelly. You'll wind up with big, cylindrical jujubes. You have to be in the moment, paying attention. You boil and sterilize stuff, you time things, you measure and take temperatures: you create an orderly little world. Unlike what has happened to you, these steps take you to what you planned on. . .
Brooding doesn't help, Bull insists. But what if you have one of those slow, sedentary, brood-inducing jobs, like University of Utah student Melina Gottling had the last time she needed to recover from an infatuation? All afternoon, every afternoon, she had nothing to do but think.
So she put a rubber band around her wrist and each time she found a certain name circling her brain, she gave the band a good hard snap. She went home every night with swollen wrists, but she got over him. "In two weeks."
One of Gottling's fellow students, Chad Margetts has recently discovered the value of getting rid of things that remind you of the lost love. He didn't always know this.
When he was younger, he enjoyed recycling the symbol of his love. In high school, he was in the habit of giving out his watch the way some other guys might give a girl their school ring. After giving out his watch and getting it back a dozen times (speed and endurance, speed and endurance) he graduated and went on to a more mature college relationship in which a young woman actually gave him a watch as a present. Then they broke up.
Margetts went back to wearing his old watch. He gave her present away forever - to his best friend who was leaving town. It's been some months now and Margetts has recovered to the point that he recently bought himself a second watch. He's stocking up, he says. He's nearly ready to give his time to someone new.
None of this pain is ever wasted, fellow student Richard Navarro points out. All the dating and all the break-ups he and the others are discussing - these are building experiences. "When I've been hurt it usually takes a couple of months to get over it," he says. The healing happens faster if he can learn to look at the last love as training for the next love. "Practice in opening the heart."
The healing happens faster if you avoid each other, too. This is advice from yet another U. of U. student, Peter Richins. "Stay away from the person. Don't relate." If you have to see her, if by chance you share a class, "act like she isn't even alive." This is the only way to go if you are the one who got dumped, he says. And if you are the dumper, it is even more important. It's up to you to make the break final.
If avoidance is the cardinal rule at college, it is also polite.
Judith Martin wrote "Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior," to remind readers that there is no excuse for bad manners. Even a mangled heart is no excuse.
Miss Manners says: If you are the one who wants to end the relationship, you can do so by politely declining to spend time with the person who is still crazy about you. If you are the crazy one, it is your duty not to act crazy.
She says, "One might protest that it is unfair for the burden of proper behavior to fall on the person who is down, rather than on the one who did the pushing. But so it is." The person who wants to walk away, should do so without explanation, she says.
But isn't it more polite to explain why you need to dump the person who loves you? "No," says Miss Manners, "No worse cruelty ever disguised itself as kindness."
She continues, "The smartest thing a dumped one can do is to get out of sight, or at least to hide all traces of misery. . . . Thus, the proper behavior for someone who's heart is breaking is to be cheerful, not pained; forgiving, not accusing; busy, not free to be comforted; mysterious, not talking the situation over; absent, not obviously alone or overdoing attention to others."
Such behavior will have two rewards, Miss Manners says. First, keeping busy will start your recovery. Second, if you don't seem heartbroken, you might hurt the feelings of the person who hurt yours.
While convalescing, you may occasionally slip. You might be too distraught to finish an assignment at work or at school. You might cry at inappropriate times. What to say? Miss Manners suggests you skip the details of your pain.
Think of what you would do if you had another sort of malady. Hemorrhoids, for example. If you found yourself weeping at a dinner party, you would recover by saying, "Excuse me, I haven't been feeling well lately." If people asked for details, you'd say, "Oh, I'd rather not go into it."
The point made by all these experts is: Keep going.
Don't make a fool of yourself if you can help it, but above all, keep going. As Debby Bull sees it, her book makes the same point as the famous Lotto slogan: You've got to be in it to win it.
"The things that make you feel better are usually simple things that connect you to the natural world and to other people, " Bull believes. It also helps, sometimes, to hang out with married people who are miserable.
Here's how Bull knew she was getting better: She went to Mexico and saw a picture of Annie Oakley taken just after she got married. She thought Annie Oakley looked sad. Bull felt cheered and came home from her vacation excited to invent a recipe for Mexican relish.
She knew she could make it so spicy it would make her eyes water. But she decided not to. She was beginning to feel like she'd cried enough.