58 pages • 1 hour read
Yulin KuangHow to End a Love Story
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Overcoming Grief and Trauma
Content Warning: The source text and this guide include descriptions of a character’s death by suicide and the death of a minor in a car accident. They also include descriptions of anxiety and panic attacks.
The central tension in Helen and Grant’s relationship comes from his involvement in her sister’s death. So, overcoming grief and trauma is central to their individual character arcs and their romantic connection. Both of them struggle with their sense of worth and their capacity for love, while rarely confronting the real source of their pain. Their eventual decision to face the past is key to their developing relationship and love for each other, underlining that only through honest reflection can they achieve true happiness and a love that nurtures them both.
While Helen blames Grant for her sister’s death, she, too, harbors deep feelings of grief and guilt. In the novel’s first chapter, Helen shares her family’s resentment toward Grant. She orders him out of Michelle’s funeral and blames him for Michelle’s death while Helen’s own “wounded heart tries to punch him through her chest” (19). Later, when she runs into him as an adult, she continues to insist that he is responsible for the death and that he should take on the blame. However, Helen, too, feels guilty about Michelle’s death because she wonders why Michelle couldn’t confide in her about the feelings that drove her to take her own life; Helen takes this as a reflection of her own failure to connect with others and thinks that she failed her sister in this way. When Helen thinks of the friends she left back in New York, who don’t seem to miss her, she thinks that these “friends […] don’t miss Helen’s defective kind of love—maybe throw in a sister too” (38). Since Helen interprets Michelle’s death as proof of her own lack of empathy and humanity, she also sees it as a reflection of her own worth. So, the anger she shows toward Grant is in fact a redirection of her anger toward herself. Moreover, Grant’s easy affability and warmth with people highlight her own lack in these areas, which irritates her even more.
Helen and Grant struggle with their traumas in different ways, though they both have trouble connecting with people on a deeper level. Helen denies her attraction toward Grant because she thinks she is protecting her sister’s memory by holding on to her loneliness and sorrow. She repeatedly avoids intimacy with Grant, including refraining from kissing him when they become physically intimate, which shows how much power she gives her grief and her fear of forsaking Michelle’s memory. Helen’s refusal to consider a future with Grant mirrors her refusal to embrace adulthood, knowing Michelle cannot join her there. Similarly, Grant’s panic attacks and tendency to avoid close personal relationships demonstrate his own lingering trauma from Michelle’s death. He pictures Helen reprimanding him as he struggles to sleep, and he later panics at the idea that he will never truly deserve her; this shows how much his guilt still haunts him.
However, after Helen and Grant become lovers, Helen tells him she welcomes his account of their past “if it helps to have someone to remember it with” (244). This moment of honesty helps Grant to finally confide his darkest fears and memories. He feels truly connected to Helen and begins to fall in love with her. In the aftermath, Helen tries to deny her powerful feelings for him by saying that “[her heart] hasn’t been working properly in years anyway” (256), underlining that her perceived failure as a sibling has also led her to doubt her potential for romance and happiness.
Finally, Helen’s angry confrontation with her parents reveals her anger and resentment over both her sister’s death and her choice to give up Grant for her family’s sake. Helen realizes that sacrificing her own happiness has become a form of self-negation. She ultimately chooses to move forward from grief and trauma, expressing her love for both Grant and Michelle. On her wedding day, Helen’s nerves disappear as soon as she is at Grant’s side, as she now thinks of her heart as “that reliable organ” which “beats […] in happilyeverafter” (368). Helen and Grant have come to accept themselves and the past, and their love for one another has helped them to surmount their shared trauma.
The Link Between Creativity and Intimacy
Grant and Helen’s shared identity as writers forms the foundation of their romantic connection—their creative collaboration mirrors their personal journeys toward self-acceptance and intimacy. They are brought together by the process of adapting Helen’s books for television, and they face career uncertainties that reflect their struggles to accept themselves and decide what they deserve in adulthood. As they grow together, their creative success and shifts in their attitudes toward writing demonstrate their personal growth, showing how their love story rests on finding the words and narratives that previously eluded them.
When Helen and Grant reconnect as adults, Helen is particularly offended when Grant offers her writing advice and reminds him of her status as a best-selling author. However, Helen’s work is shaped by her personal losses, particularly her sister’s death, as she writes about teens in an effort to process her grief. She says she has “spun this personal wound into gold many times over” (27). The fairy tale allusion here, to the story of Rumpelstiltskin, reflects that Helen tries to contain her creativity to the version of herself that existed when her sister was alive. Her writer’s block and turn to the television show shows that she is looking for a way to move past that stage, into an artistic adulthood, but she has doubts about her ability to do so. Helen’s resentment that Grant is more effective in the writers’ room—especially his talent for “convincing a room full of people that his ideas are the best way forward” (46)—reinforces her belief that her own artistic struggles are an inherent character flaw. She also assumes that Grant, like herself, has remained struck in the past, in his adolescent self.
Helen’s eventual acknowledgment of Grant’s writing talents, after she and Grant have become intimate, marks a turning point in her perception of both him and herself. She admits that his skill in engaging a group of writers is matched by his ability to draw her into a story, which makes him as—if not more—talented than she is. Helen also expresses her fears of a deeper connection between them in creative terms, saying she is anxious that “his script might be ‘an honest glimpse of how he sees her’” (233). As committed as she is to keeping their relationship casual, her admiration of Grant’s creative skills betrays her deeper attachment to him. She fears that his script will somehow enmesh them further, underscoring that for Helen, creativity builds intimacy.
As Helen begins to accept her own feelings, the connection between romance and art becomes more pronounced. She envisions “a Hollywood movie ending” for Grant, complete “with swelling music and camera movements and kissing in the rain” (331), but she hesitates to write herself into the story. Ultimately, it is through writing that Helen finds self-acceptance. She confesses her love for Grant in a letter to him, composed in Los Angeles. She finds and accepts love, for her sister and for Grant. Her decision to “return Grant Shepherd to the present tense” signifies her readiness to embrace the present and their shared future (254). By their wedding, both Helen and Grant have successfully produced new projects, demonstrating that their love for one another has driven them to new creative heights.
The Pressures of Social Roles and Expectations
Helen is Chinese American, and her cultural identity is fundamental to her sense of self. However, it is also a source of conflict as she grapples with the expectations her parents place on her. Both Helen and Grant are also preoccupied with the social expectations of adulthood, as they work on reconciling their adolescent selves with their adult selves. Their romantic journey thus involves them identifying the ways these social roles and expectations no longer serve them and shedding these identities to become better partners to each other.
After Grant’s car struck and killed Michelle, he is seen as a victim by the community. At Michelle’s funeral, Helen thinks that most people are thinking “how sad, how tragic, how selfish, that this girl, practically a stranger, some sophomore with a suicidal itch, would do something like this” (2). Michelle is not seen as a figure of pity—rather, the community reserves all their sympathy for Grant. However, Helen realizes that Grant doesn’t absolve himself of blame. He admits that “he could get away with killing someone and everyone would still treat him the same as always” (254); still, he takes no comfort in the approval of those around him. His panic attacks, triggered by reminders of the accident, underlines that he sees himself as someone who deserves suffering. He defines himself by the tragedy rather than the successes Helen associates with him.
Both Grant and Helen are struggling to move past the social roles that define them: Grant, the tragic hero in the eyes of the community, and Helen, the dutiful daughter burdened by cultural expectations. Grant’s choice to end his casual relationship with Lauren, which began shortly before the accident, signifies that meeting Helen again gives him the chance to redefine himself in the present. Helen’s survivor’s guilt intertwines with her cultural background, as she sets about fulfilling her role as a “guai nui, Such a good girl” (235)—her parents applied this label to her more intensely after Michelle’s death, guilting her into thinking she must be perfect to make up for that tragedy.
Helen also feels guilty about being disconnected from her parents’ culture—a separation that is both literal and emotional due to their lack of a shared language. Helen later tells Grant that she worries it might seem to him that she does not love her parents, demonstrating her acute awareness of belonging to two cultures and needing to translate her relationship with her parents for him. This cultural divide deepens when Helen ends their relationship, believing she must conform to her family’s expectations.
Helen’s fear of being unable to love fully surfaces in the hospital, when she worries that “she’ll never be able to love simply and without disclaimers” (312). It is this fear that leads her to lash out at her parents when they constantly pressure her to conform to their expectations. Ultimately, the new distance between Helen and her parents allows her to realize later that her mother does show her love through small yet significant gestures like baking her favorite cake. After this, Helen writes her letters to Michelle. By realizing that she is loved for who she is, Helen can create a family relationship that is rooted in honesty rather than guilt and shame. Helen tells her parents about her relationship with Grant and faces their disapproval without panic. Grant, for his part, offers incense to Michelle as Mrs. Zhang requests, assuring Helen that he accepts her identity even if he does not share it. Helen’s parents are present at her wedding, indicating that she has found a way to balance her personal happiness with her family’s expectations.
