Minda Honey opens her memoir, "The Heartbreak Years," by taking us back to 2008, "a time before Tinder, before Uber, before Amazon same-day delivery." She was 23 and living in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she had just been sabotaged out of her first post-college corporate job by a racist boss, when she drove both the car and the boyfriend she'd had since high school across the country to Orange County, California, to house-sit for his grandparents. Her boyfriend had a dream to pursue there and, as she writes, she "was just content to flee the cold."
The relationship didn't last, but Honey stayed in California for several years, with a detour in Denver, before returning home to Louisville, Kentucky, where she lives today. In this sparkling debut, Honey — editor of Black Joy at Reckon News, erstwhile advice columnist and media entrepreneur, and former director of the BFA in Creative Writing program at Spalding University, where I also teach — chronicles with generous humor and self-awareness the highs and lows of partying, hooking up, dating and breaking up with a series of memorable young men in Obama-era Southern California, while also trying on a series of professional identities before she committed to her writing career.
