Themes of love, fate, running away from it all, and history – both family history and the broader kind - are captured in Bridget van der Zijpp’s new novel, I Laugh Me Broken.

Protagonist Ginny has bolted to Berlin from a comfortable, dependable life in Auckland, in order to research a controversial sea captain, Count von Luckner, for a book she is writing. The explanation for her sudden relocation is flimsy and her fiancée, Jay, is left dazed and confused. Jay doesn’t understand Ginny’s motivations because she is keeping a secret from him. Early in the book we learn that Ginny may or may not have inherited a serious genetic condition, a legacy from her mother.

I Laugh Me Broken takes its title from a German saying much like our own, “I laughed my head off,” often said drily, dripping with sarcasm. It has to be said that the novel is much more ponderous than humorous so perhaps the title is a wink at the mistranslations we experience with other people, even when we are close, even when we both speak the same language.

In I Laugh Me Broken, the diverse cast are all trying to figure themselves out as Ginny tries to decide what her relationship with them will be. There is Mel, her stepsister who is oppositional, attention-seeking and often unkind; dependable, capable Jay, who is the polar opposite of Mel; Frankie, Ginny’s flatmate who is having a lot of casual sex; Boz who wants to have casual sex with Ginny, and Pascual, with whom Ginny has an intimate encounter but never learns his last name.

It’s a book where you have to keep up. Ultimately Ginny herself is the biggest mystery to untangle. Will she get the genetic testing to see if she has the condition she fears? Will she stay in Berlin? Will she break Jay’s heart once and for all? Will she finish writing her book about Count von Luckner or is a completely different story evolving instead?

Berlin plays a major role in I Laugh Me Broken, as Ginny experiences her own mid-thirties version of an overseas experience (“O.E.”). Minor characters include Berlin’s homeless, alcoholic, drugs-influenced, unusual and marginalised people that Ginny observes while in cafes, on public transport or wandering through public parks. While Ginny explores the rich and complicated history of Berlin, she finds herself confronted with the eugenics policies of Nazi Germany, including a sterilisation law passed in 1933, which surely would have impacted her family if they had been living in Germany at the time.

I Laugh Me Broken features many of the stories you tell when you meet someone in a different country – fragments of your fuller history or something funny or terrible that happened to you once. While these stories initially seem unrelated, van der Zijpp is a master of theme and the tales often hold deeper meaning. In one scene, Ginny’s flatmate Frankie describes minor fraud that affected her bank account and says “…it freaked me out for a while. That the world seemed so full of these malign forces who were trying to find complicated ways to commit crimes against you.”

Full of tangled relationships, tough decisions, casual sex and European sights and scenes, I Laugh Me Broken is as much an internal journey as an account of an O.E. Aptly, given that Ginny is full of impending doom and unknown outcomes, it ends at the very beginning of the coronavirus pandemic which left all of us in some version of Ginny’s state of mind.

Reviewed by Hannah Tunnicliffe