Feeling Broken Up? Breakup Girl to the Rescue

Being single on Valentine’s Day is difficult. And being just jilted is the worst.

“Feel better, schmeel better” is the credo voiced by the sardonic superhero Breakup Girl, Lynn Harris’ animated alter ego who dashes across the Internet in search of woebegone wayfarers in need of some consolation and a good giggle. Breakup Girl feels your pain because, well, she’s felt your pain. Or as she puts it, “I’ll be right there . . . because I’ve been there.” Harris knows what it’s like to feel that “all the faces in the New York Times wedding pages are laughing at you.”

Breakup Girl has been mending broken hearts online since November 1997 with an award-wining Web site (https://www.breakupgirl.com) that features an interactive advice column, humorous essays and practical tips, as well as a serialized comic strip of the everyday adventures of a heroine bent on fighting crimes of the heart. Now that she has conquered cyberspace, Breakup Girl plans to take to the airwaves in a half-hour situation comedy in development with producer Robert Morton (who formerly produced David Letterman’s show.)

Harris isn’t kidding when she tells you that she wrote the book on breakups. She sallied her own love affair-turned-love despair into “He Loved Me, He Loves Me Not: A Guide to Fudge, Fury, Free Time and Life Beyond the Breakup” (Avon Books, 1996). Designed and illustrated by upstairs neighbor/best friend/business partner Chris Kalb, the book featured the first incarnation of Breakup Girl, as the hero-narrator. The self-indulgent, self-help guide instructs the newly dejected on how to “craft your very own voodoo doll” or “choose the right kind of chocolate for your mood.”

A historical look at pivotal breakups includes a peek at the Precambrian Era, in which “the continents, once close, begin to drift apart.” “The Cooking With Pain” section features recipes like “It’s Not Like I’m Going to Be Kissing Anybody Garlic Bread” and “Men Are Pigs in a Blanket.”

After the book had been out for a time, Harris and Kalb got the idea for a presence on the Web. “We decided that two dimensions were not enough for our hero. The Web struck us as the perfect, perhaps the only, place for her to give interactive advice, and have ongoing adventures. Hence breakupgirl.com.”

Harris’ affinity for comedy comes from beneath her other hat, as a stand-up comic. Currently, she performs monthly at Gotham Comedy Club in New York City, and the show is cybercast live on https://www.comedynet.com (on the first Thursday of every month, 5:30 p.m.).

Harris gets most of her monthly stand-up material from the letters she receives online. She finds that the Internet is an excellent way for the walking wounded to bare their innermost angst. “The Web offers this odd but true balance between intimacy and distance. You can spill your guts, but you’re still . . . typing,” she said. “You can tell someone everything about yourself and they still don’t necessarily know who you are.”

While Breakup Girl may possess superhuman powers (she wields a Breakup Phone that magically redials calls to your ex and takes back whatever you just said), it is actually Harris’ and her alter ego’s truly human side that makes her, as Harris puts it, “both look-upable-to and accessible. People aren’t afraid to ask her things that they are afraid to ask others; and when they do, they trust her answers.”

Harris feels that the character’s imperfections keep her from being annoyingly perfect. In the cartoon, for instance, when the Breakup Hotline rings, Breakup Girl waits for three rings, in case it’s the guy she’s dating. “She’s a superwoman when you need help, but onlyEverywoman (or Everyperson) when it’s about herself,” said Harris.

“No matter how strong we are, no matter what level of power or stature we achieve in society, we are still--for better or worse--ruled by our relationships. Bending steel bars--that’s impressive. But mending broken hearts? That’s power! The heart rules us . . . but Breakup Girl rules the heart.”