Maddy Court - The Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend Is My Girlfriend - Advice on Queer Dating, Love, and Friendship

This book is dedicated to everyone who has ever Googled the words am I gay?

Text copyright 2021 by Madeline Court. Illustrations copyright 2021 by Kelsey Wroten.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Court, Maddy, author. | Wroten, Kelsey, illustrator.
Title: The ex-girlfriend of my ex-girlfriend is my girlfriend : advice on queer dating, love, and friendship / written by Maddy Court ; illustrated by Kelsey Wroten.
Description: San Francisco : Chronicle Books, [2021].
Identifiers: LCCN 2020046747 | ISBN 9781797201825 (pb); ISBN 9781797202228 (epub, mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Lesbians--Life skills guides. | Sexual minorities--Life skills guides. | Lesbianism. | Dating (Social customs) | Sex counseling.
Classification: LCC HQ75.5 .C68 2021 | DDC 306.76--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020046747

Design by Lizzie Vaughan.

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Dear Readers,

This is a book about queer love and relationships. I wrote it entirely in bed. I tried, repeatedly, to find a respectable writing place like a coffee shop, library, or the food court of an abandoned mall. But I always ended up back in bed, braless and snacking. Even though Im a lesbian, writing about emotions and relationships is exhausting for me. I hate feeling like an authority figure or like Im telling other people what to do. Im not a therapist or a mental health professional. The fact that Im writing an introduction to a book still feels implausible to me, like a dream.

The Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend Is My Girlfriend began as a zinea black-and-white booklet that I wrote, copied, folded, and stapled together all by myself. At the time, I was twenty-five and languishing in a womens studies grad program. I was bitingly lonely. I spent my days writing long, airless essays about feminism that nobody, not even my professors, wanted to read. I presented my work at a conference and there were three people in the audience, including my mom. On top of everything, I was flat broke. I could barely afford my rent, let alone the minimum payment on my Discover card. One night, I took a bath and evaluated my resources. I had free university printing and a few thousand followers on Instagram. As a lesbian on the internet, I was constantly getting DMs from strangers seeking advicemessages like, I think Im gay? or Should my girlfriend and I open our relationship? All the ingredients for a zine about queer dating, friendship, and love were right there in front of me.

I expected to sell fifty copies of The Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend Is My Girlfriend, maybe a hundred. I received four hundred orders the first week alone. Readers shared the zine and told their friends. Over the next year, I hired my mom to help with operations and wrote two more volumesThe Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend Is My Wife and The Ex-Girlfriend of My Ex-Girlfriend Is My Ex-Wife. Today, there are over ten thousand copies of the Ex-Girlfriend zines around the world. The zines are the most humbling, gratifying thing I have ever done. When Kelsey Wroten, my favorite artist and graphic novelist, asked me to collaborate on a full-color book, I was like, YES.

Kelsey is from Kansas. Im from Wisconsin. We came out at a time when queer books, movies, and other media were scarce. The internet existed but it wasnt the searchable, free-flowing well of queer expression that it is today. When we envisioned this book, we wanted readers to feel seen and validated in a way that we had to wait until college to experience. Our hope was that queers of all stripes would see their relationships, anxieties, and heartbreaks reflected in these pages.

All of the questions in this book are from real people. All names have been changed. We put out an open call for submissions and selected questions that did justice to the range of identities and concerns we saw in the responses. Some of the queries were out of my depth, so Kelsey and I enlisted the help of seven guest expertsJD Samson, Samantha Irby, Lola Pellegrino, Mey Rude, Ellen Kempner, Tyler Ford, and Kalyn Rose Heffernan. In spite of the wide-ranging topics covered in these questions, one book cannot possibly encapsulate every queer experiencenot even close. Still, we hope that you see enough of yourself in these letters to know that whatever youre going through, someone out there can relate.

Kelsey and I hope this book is useful to you. When youre done, we hope you pass it along to a friend.

XOXO,
MADDY COURT & KELSEY WROTEN

A NOTE ON LANGUAGE AND CONTENT

While putting this book together, we realized that there is no cohesive or correct language to talk about queer identities and experiences. In the following pages, you might see people reclaim slurs for themselves or otherwise use language that doesnt feel right to you. Because this is a book about the experiences of queer people, there are discussions of homophobia, transphobia, ableism, fatphobia, and other forms of oppression throughout. There is a question about abuse on .

I was destroyed when my first girlfriend broke up with me. I tried to take a leave of absence from college, just so I wouldnt have to see her walking around campus with her new girlfriend. The only thing that stopped me was meeting with my dean and learning that leaving would mean forfeiting my financial aid. It was a dark time. I remember lying on my extra-long twin bed and just watching the moon through my window. I was like, So this is what all those songs and poems are about. I felt like Id joined a special club for people who had loved and lost. In the decade or so since, Ive weathered dozens of breakups. Ive felt high levels of disappointment, rejection, and anger. Ive cried on city buses in Portland, OR; Philadelphia; Brooklyn; and Madison, WI. Still, I will never be as unmoored or devastated as I was after my first breakup.

When youre in love for the first time, everything is THE MOST. Your love is the most profound. The sex youre having is the BEST. No relationship will ever compare. Not to be a cynical dyke who has walked this earth for a hundred years, but these feelings will pass. They will dissipate like dust in the wind, and you will be free. You will love and date again, and youll be a wiser, more grounded partner because youve done it all before.