(944) The Chocolate Run by Dorothy Koomson

At first glance, this seems to be a modern novel that said a lot about sex. I flipped through it, read snippets here and there but actually kept the book for months before I seriously read it. I was not willing to return it because I enjoyed its sister book: marshmallows for breakfast. Now, I am glad I did not write it off and return it impulsively.

I am a child of the Sixties. While the hippies had their revolution, my family was working hard to climb up to the lower middle class in a developing country. If I say that divorce is an alien concept to me at age twenty one, you may not believe me. Yet it is true that the only person I knew for sure then whose parents had divorced was a girl I was hardly close to in the morning session in my Primary School. (I was in the afternoon session.) We used to leave notes asking if the other had found this book or that pencil. Now and then we insulted each other's class cleanliness committee. I thought her surname was Wong but in Grade Six it became Yap instead. At first I thought I had a memory lapse. Funny that my very good memory should fail. Many years later in casual conversation with her former classmates I heard that her mum who was a hot-shot business woman divorced her father for whatever reason. The attractive mum later remarried and the step-father legally adopted her, hence the sudden change of family name. Looking back, there must have been other divorces, but it was such a bad stigma that nobody was willing to admit it. So that was my kind of background: in general parents may fight daily, they may beat each other up, some mothers would take their kids and hide in relatives' houses until the confrontation blew over, but marriage is for life, literally for better or for worse.

Guess my reaction when I found that a good forty percent of my Freshman dorm mates have two sets of parents, my eyes must have popped out with disbelief, no wonder I was not exactly Miss Popular in that American College. Then as I settled down and made friends, I found quite a number of them behaving in very illogical manner in boy-girl relationships. As soon as the girl caught a whiff of suspicious cooling off or the guy looked at another chick twice, there our friend will cry and initiate a break-up. Many were the hours I sat down in different rooms acting as agony aunt, listening and offering tissues or hankies and coffee or chocolates. Until a week ago I thought my college was a magnet to poor little rich girls with huge sensitive egos and emotional personalities. Now, learning from the above book, I realised that these girls were merely insecure because they saw their mothers suffered from marital breakup in close quarters. They probably blamed themselves for the painful breakup if it had occurred  while they were young. Therefore rather than being dumped and be pathetic, they would preempt and dump the guy at first suspicious opportunity.

Wish I had been more into novels earlier in my youth and had come across such authors who are good at explaining affairs of the heart. It is no wonder that even though I was an effective listener, I could not understand those younger girls. Nothing I could possibly suggest register with them. There I was, shorter, not as attractive, hardly use any make up, happy that at twenty one I appeared sixteen in the land of grow-up-fast mentality; but I have never feared that I would be left on the shelve or forced to remain single all my life. Never occur to me that I should lack suitors, fully confident that whoever wins my hand in marriage would be a very lucky man. Now I realise it is because I was the apple of both my parents' eyes, they might not be exactly happy with each other but they have made sure I grew up in a totally secure environment. As a result I was happy and at ease with myself, indirectly attracting guys who look for that sense of security in a girl.