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  • The Breakup MuseumArchiving the Way We Were
  • Leslie Jamison (bio)

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Exhibit 1: Clamshell Necklace Florence, Italy

It's a simple necklace: a tiny, brown-striped clamshell tied to a black leather cord. The shell was gathered from a beach in Italy, and attached to the cord by means of two holes drilled into the shell with a dental drill. The person who made the necklace for me was a dental student in Florence at the time. He did it secretly, in one of his classes, while he was supposed to be learning how to make crowns. I wore that necklace every single day, until I didn't anymore.


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The Museum of Broken Relationships is a collection of ordinary objects hung on walls, tucked under glass, backlit on pedestals: a toaster, a child's pedal car, a modem handmade in 1988. A wooden toilet paper dispenser. A positive pregnancy stick. A positive drug test. An axe. They come from Taipei, from Slovenia, from Colorado, from Manila, all donated by strangers, each accompanied by a story: In the 14 days of her holiday, every day I axed one piece of her furniture.

One of the most popular items in the gift shop is the "Bad Memories Eraser"—an actual eraser sold in several shades—but in truth the museum is something closer to the psychic opposite of an eraser. Every one of its objects insists that something was, rather than trying to make it disappear. Donating an object to the museum permits surrender and permanence at once. You get it out of your home, and you make it immortal. "She was a regional buyer for a grocer and that meant I got to try some great samples," reads the caption next to a box of maple and sea salt microwave popcorn. "I miss her, her dog, and the samples, and can't stand to have this fancy microwave popcorn in my house." The donor couldn't stand to have it, but he also couldn't bear to throw it away. He wanted to put it on a pedestal instead.

When it comes to breakups, we are attached to certain dominant narratives of purgation, liberation, and exorcism: the idea that we're supposed to want to get the memories out of us, free ourselves from their grip. But this museum recognizes that our relationship to the past—its pain and ruptures and betrayals—is often more fraught, more vexed, full of ebb and pull. When I visited its permanent home in Zagreb, Croatia—housed in a baroque aristocratic home perched at the edge of Upper Town—I was on my own, though almost everyone else had come as part of a couple. The lobby was full of men waiting for wives and girlfriends who were spending [End Page 73] longer with the exhibits. I imagined all these couples steeped in schadenfreude and fear: This isn't us. This could be us. In the guest book, I saw one entry that said simply: "I should end my relationship, but I probably won't," and fingered my own wedding ring—as proof, for comfort—but couldn't help imagining the ring as another exhibit, too.


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Before flying to Zagreb, I'd put out a call to my friends—What object would you donate to this museum?—and got descriptions I couldn't have imagined: a mango candle, a penis-shaped gourd, the sheet music from Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto no. 3, a clamshell drilled by a dental student, an illustration from a children's book that an ex had loved when he was young—showing a line of gray mice with thought bubbles full of the same colors above their heads, as if they were all dreaming the same dream. The objects my friends described all reached toward these obsolete past tenses: that time we dreamed the same dream. They were relics from those dreams, as the museum exhibits were relics from the dreams of strangers—attempts to insist that they had left some residue behind...

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