This is My Memory of First Heartbreak, Which I Can’t Quite Piece Back Together

This is My Memory of First Heartbreak, Which I Can’t Quite Piece Back Together: A graphic memoir exploring the author’s memory of her first heartbreak. Created as an interactive, sequential experience, This is My Memory of First Heartbreak, Which I Can’t Quite Piece Back Together (TMMFH) attempts to convey the fluid and subjective nature of this highly emotional, complex, and (increasingly) distant memory.

While at its core, this is a story of two young adults who argue on a suburban front porch late one summer night, it is really the story of the arc of their entire relationship. It is the complex set of occurrences surrounding the actual moment of heartbreak that make up the very fabric of it.

Using her background in information graphics, Goldstick designed the experience of TMMFH as logically as possible, attempting to quantify and string together the events of the memory in a way that felt evocative and nostalgic. Ultimately, the goals of the project were to tell a subjective, emotional story that an informational, diagrammatic approach could be applied toward, and to watch the consequences of that experiment unfold. It quickly turned into an interactive endeavor when it became clear that the story should be told non-linearly.