Coming-of-age novels in which the central character escapes from poverty, or some other form of challenging background, often present a sense of doubleness, where the protagonist feels as if they are more than one person. Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend is a recent example, but we see it as far back as Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song where the protagonist Chris talks specifically about there being ‘two Chrisses’. Melissa, in Columbian author Lina Munar Gueravara’s debut novel Imagine Breaking Everything (translated by Ellen Jones), has a similar feeling after returning to her old neighbourhood to visit the mother she hasn’t seen for months, hoping that she can go back to being “Melissa from La Alborada, from Ofelia, the real Melissa…
“Because that was the real Melissa, right? The one who fell silent in history lessons and couldn’t handle the infinite answers in calculus, who played basketball like a regular student and was going to graduate, that was the real Melissa. It had to be, because it couldn’t be the other one, the one who had punched Pilar Villareal in the face.”
Melissa’s journey through her old neighbourhood reacquaints her with the past she is hoping to escape, but the first indication that she had not yet accomplished this occurs as the novel opens and we learn that she is in danger of not graduating after smashing a printer which the school insists she must pay for first. This propensity for violence originates with a violent father but when her mother eventually leaves him to stay with her brother (who is now Melissa’s Aunt Anahi) she quickly abandons her daughter. When her mother appears unannounced, as the novel opens, to pick her up, she is unable to have the honest conversation with her she would like:
“Questions that all boiled down to just one: are you all right without me? The question scared me because I didn’t know how to say yes without her thinking I didn’t still miss her. Even more scary was the answer she might give.”
As she returns to the place where she used to live (“Everything looked familiar, even the few things that were new”) she worries that the new Melissa will be replaced by the old Melissa:
“Yeah, I was a different person… but I was scared of forgetting that.”
Melissa has reasons to regret her past as we discover when she is attacked on her first day back. She suspects the Martinez brothers, children when she left, taking revenge as she killed their cat (not entirely deliberately but by putting laxatives in its food). Later she will attempt to apologise to Pilar Villareal, a girl she bullied relentlessly (including smashing a model she brought into school, an early example of breaking everything), another encounter that will end in violence when Pilar refuses to accept her apology and retaliates with a few home truths about Melissa’s mother. Melissa carries the marks of this violence throughout the novel, and at one point, despairing at the difficulty of changing, compares it to her mother’s tattoo:
“It doesn’t matter what clothes we wear, how much make-up we put on, underneath it all she’s got her Tweety and I’ve got my bruise, it doesn’t matter what we do, our mistakes are branded on our skin, forever, so we won’t forget we’re the same people as before, the same people we always were, because people don’t change, they just lie.”
Her mother, Melissa fears, cannot change. One incident she recalls is when she broke her thumb punching a door (another example of breaking everything) and her mother does not come to collect her from the hospital until the next day. But she also has the example of her Aunt Anahi who has transitioned, and encourages her to control her temper by counting to seven – even the role models in her life seem like polar opposites. Her mother’s behaviour is compared not to Judas but to Peter as, according to Melissa’s friend Zapata:
“Denying someone like that is betrayal, how could it not be? Peter was even worse than Judas because he was Jesus’s best mate, and he didn’t deny him just once or twice, he denied him three times.”
Melissa will come to remember Zapata’s words as she struggles to see a future with her mother.
Imagine Breaking Everything depicts the struggle to escape your fate engagingly and often humorously. The fact that Melissa is attempting to leave behind her impulse to violence while also coming to terms with her mother’s erratic and unreliable love for her adds a new dimension to this likeable coming-of-age story. Presented to the reader with all her flaws and doubts, Melissa is a character who reaches beyond to page to engage the reader’s hope for her future.
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