Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me

Edited by Ben Karlin

Grand Central Publishing

$12.99 Paperback

Getting dumped is a bad thing for your personal life, but it can be great for your professional one if you’re a writer. You always have that deep well of personal experience to draw upon if you need material. You might even learn something about yourself in the process … or not.

“Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me” (Grand Central Publishing, $12.99) comes out in paperback just in time for Valentine’s Day. Edited by Ben Karlin (“The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report”), the book is a collection of short essays on the subject of heartbreak as it pertains to the male perspective. It’s a who’s who of modern comedy, with a wide range of contributions that alternate between painful and hilarious often within the same paragraph. Each selection shows that, however badly a relationship ended, those involved learned something about themselves to hopefully avoid doing again in subsequent relationships. Even if it took a few dozen tries (and a rap sheet of restraining orders) to get it right.

Patton Oswalt gives perspective on his most recent relationship by comparing it to a previous one with a stripper (a neurotic mess with daddy issues). “Savage Love” columnist Dan Savage comes out of the closet after a particularly disastrous heterosexual experience. Larry Wilmore can’t enjoy being a new dad because his infant daughter toys with his emotions. A.J. Jacobs is forever stuck in the “friend” role for a sexually adventurous “dirty girl.” Will Forte warns of the motorcycle-riding tutor who might sweep your lady off her feet. Bob Odenkirk of “Mr. Show” fame details exactly how long you should be in a terrible relationship (nine years). In the most moving piece, former senator Bob Kerrey remembers a lost love that he never actually met, but whose picture he kept after she was killed in a tragic accident. And Stephen Colbert’s memories of a long-ago fling are heavily edited by his wife. Throughout these and the other pieces in “Things I’ve Learned” is a gut-busting and cringe-inducing book that many readers (male and female) will both find utterly ridiculous and a little too close to home in their descriptions of how it feels to be dumped.

Don’t mistake this for an anti-female tirade, however. “Things I’ve Learned” is always about how the male in whatever relationship learned from the experience in order to make his other attempts at romance more successful. The book doesn’t necessarily say that it’s better to have loved and lost than to never loved at all; it just says that sometimes the painful experience of losing can be more enlightening than you’d think. The crazy thing about relationships is that in the immediate aftermath of an end-point, you’ll wander around feeling lost and sure that it’ll never happen again. What “Things I’ve Learned” tries to do ultimately is say that yes, it will. You should take notes on why your past relationship fell through, though. Those could come in handy next time you manage to charm someone into dating you.

“Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me” isn’t so much a relationship “how to” book as it is a “how not to” manual for the romantically-challenged. If you’ve just been dumped, you might not find anything funny about the experience. If you’ve had some time to heal, though, this book will make you laugh with appreciation and recognition. And who knows, you might even learn a few things yourself from the women who dumped the men in the book.