Bridget van der Zijpp
Latest Release
I Laugh Me Broken
‘For the first time in my life I believed I was really thinking about self-sacrifice. Wasn’t the most noble act, the greater love, not to tell him, not to force his obligation?’
When Ginny makes contact with her estranged relatives and discovers her genetic heritage may contain a devastating fault, she bolts to Berlin, leaving her loving fiancé in the dark.
Rather than face up to the life-changing implications of this news, she loses herself in the transient, hedonistic city. As she meets its inhabitants and absorbs their tangle of stories, she tries to gather then courage to take the genetic test that will either free her or define her future.
Asking what we owe to the people we love, and what it means to live a truly free life, I Laugh Me Broken is a sharp, beautifully drawn novel about self-discovery and self-determination.
‘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 Magazine
Review quotes
‘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, problems with no neat solutions. 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 – and now I’m questioning that assumption, because the novel shows so beautifully that bad news doesn’t have to, and shouldn’t be, the end of laughter’
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