No matter how cynical and anti-consumer culture you may be, Valentine’s Day is often a bitch when you’re not coupled up—especially so if you’re going through a breakup. A couple of years ago investigative reporter (and sometimes Reader collaborator) Yana Kunichoff found herself at the end of a nine-year relationship. The breakup was an apocalypse in the way only ones that mean the end of a whole life and way of being can be. After a year of struggling through her feelings, she decided to make processing the breakup a political project and enlisted collaborators, including her roommate and partner in heartbreak, Kelly Viselman, to make a zine.
I was reading research papers. I was like: “There must be some kind of empirical answer!” But I was not really finding anything. I was finding these terrible articles. All these photos of a woman sitting amongst plants alone. [The breakup] felt much rawer and much more intense than any of these things acknowledged so I was like: “What else can I do?” As a general approach to my own emotional space and emotional experience of a woman I kind of think in the frame of Elena Ferrante, Doris Lessing, bell hooks—the personal is political. In my own coming to this place of independence and openness with the people around me I was like, “This is not just a personal experience. This is a political awakening to a different way I want to be in the world, and a reckoning with my own emotional space.” I had never done zines before. But the person I’m in a relationship with now came from a much more DIY, punk anarchist culture. And I was so interested in this creative idea as a way of processing. Zines have a radical political history and having other people be part of the zine was really big because a project like this is not just like publishing my journal. I want there to be a space for people to come together around this issue and think creatively about “What are the artifacts of this really painful thing that you’ve gone through?”
Because it’s an ego death.
