I Laugh Me Broken

When I first saw the small balcony overlooking an urban park, it perfectly matched my ideas about living in this city, spending time out there, writing. Having arrived in autumn, though, this was probably more romantic than practical. My new housemate, Frankie, had left coffee and bread on the bench in the kitchen. Last night she'd shown me to my room, mentioning something about her job at a co-working space where she wrote content for start-ups including one, she'd said, rolling her eyes, that made luggage suitable for taking into space.

It was already past noon, and my ears were still ringing from the flight. I took a kitchen chair out through the double doors and sat inhaling deeply, replacing the stagnancy of twenty-four hours of filtered cabin air. The trees were only just beginning their seasonal turn, and from the playground nearby I could hear the screeches of kids having fun. Also the odd phrase: 'Spinnst du?' Down below was a small courtyard, its surrounding walls covered in tags and graffiti. Somebody had taken the time to spray the word Hundstage in large letters. Dog days. A band? A movement?

Soon a group of young teenage boys assembled there, as if it was a regular thing, to play hardcore rap and shit-talk, and the paving created an amphitheatre effect that threw their voices right up to the second storey. My school-level German was not enough to understand what they were saying, but the tone of it was posturing and raucous. They sniffed something off the blade of one boy's knife and then took off their jackets and started wrestling with each other, jumping off low walls, practising something that looked like a mix of capoeira and parkour.

I retreated back inside, but a person can sit at the table in their new apartment, in a city that's unknown to them, telling themselves they are well, but that doesn't mean they are. I let uncomfortable thoughts seep in like a pernicious gas. Ordinary tiredness? My fingers tingling?

Bridget van der Zijpp is the author of three novels: Misconduct, In the Neighbourhood of Fame and I Laugh Me Broken. Misconduct was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Best First Book Prize, South East Asia and the Pacific Region. It was also shortlisted for the 2009 Montana New Zealand Book Awards Best First Book of Fiction, and was also included in the NZ Listener Best Books of 2008. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University.

Praise for I laugh me broken

'Chaotic modernity is . . . narrated with astute clarity in Bridget van der Zijpp's new novel. Leaving behind her past to run away to Berlin, the narrator of I Laugh Me Broken descends into a personal spiral in the city as she becomes undone' i-D

'Gives a sense of the way that life continues to be beautiful, funny, and worth living even when we're in the middle of wrestling with questions that have no good answers . . . I didn't expect a novel about a woman deciding whether to find out if she has a horrible disease to make me laugh so much' Sara Taylor, author of The Lauras

'A beautifully written novel, keenly observed, with a vivid cast of characters.' Saga Magazine


'A poignant time capsule, a surprising love story and a clever take on the hapless-woman-finds-herself genre' New Zealand Herald

Praise for Bridget van der Zijpp


'Packed full of astute observation, spinning towards a crisis which doesn't have a predictable outcome' Linda Herrick, New Zealand Herald

'Finely tuned observations of relationships and identity, and how easily they can be the making or undoing of each other' Sam Finnemore, New Zealand Listener

'An adult, thought-provoking and gripping story on a real social issue' Steve Walker, Sunday Star-Times