Mavis Gallant’s “My Heart Is Broken” is a story about the difficulty of knowing what has happened to another person — and perhaps the even greater difficulty of knowing what to do with that knowledge. What makes the story so unsettling is Gallant’s refusal to give the reader the kind of emotional resolution we might expect from a story about violence and suffering.
Gallant was a Canadian writer who spent much of her adult life in Paris. She was known for her short stories and for her unsentimental observations of people, particularly those who are isolated or caught between worlds. That same quality comes through in this story. Gallant does not tell us how we are supposed to feel. She watches her characters closely and allows their contradictions and discomfort to remain.
The story centers on a young woman who has been assaulted, but Gallant does not make the assault itself the emotional center of the story. Instead, she examines the people around the woman and the ways they respond to what has happened. Their reactions are complicated by discomfort, assumptions and an inability to fully enter another person’s experience.
I’ve often thought about the title of this story. How it works in so many contexts. How it could be the title of many stories — about seeking love, falling in love, being in love — or out of it.
But this is a very different kind of story. It’s hard to know where love fits — and indeed how a heart fits — broken or otherwise.
“My Heart Is Broken” also sounds like an expression of sympathy, but Gallant makes us question whose heart is actually broken — and what that feeling means when it belongs to someone observing another person’s pain. Feeling sorry for someone is not necessarily the same as understanding them. Sometimes sympathy can even create distance. It can make the other person feel not pitiable, but pitiful.
What I find most striking in this story — in Gallant’s writing generally — is her restraint. There is no easy lesson about trauma or recovery, and the characters are not neatly divided into compassionate people and uncaring ones. Instead, Gallant captures the awkwardness, the incomprehension of witnessing particular kinds of suffering and the ways people can turn someone else’s experience into something they can understand or emotionally manage — but only on their own terms and for their own purposes that don’t always manage to make a connection with the other person.
The story’s power comes partly from what it withholds. With each new reading, I'm left feeling that nothing was resolved, but I think that is precisely the point. That is so real and true. Gallant leaves us with discomfort and unease rather than closure and asks us to remain with the uncertainty rather than trying to resolve another person’s pain for them.
