The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale

Can you put a price tag on love? A quest to determine what our romantic relationships are actually worth through personal narrative, dead pan humour and the creation of a mathematical formula. Haley McGee is in debt. The solution? A yard sale of everything her ex-boyfriends have ever given her. The idea concocted during a panicked phone call to her credit-card company snowballs into a one-woman show to figure out exactly how much all the love, all the heartbreak, all the good, the bad and the boring times are actually worth. Is the mixtape from your first love worth more than the typewriter from the man who betrayed you? What about the t-shirt from your on-off partner of three years who can't quite bring himself to admit he loves you, but has found his way back into your life, again? Or if you sustained a minor physical injury (and ruined jeans) via a box cutter wedged between the seat of a bus on your way to see the guy may or may not have been dealing weed on the side? Such is Haley's determination to figure out what our failed romantic relationships are worth, she enlists the help of a mathematician to devise a formula complete with 52 variables - from market value to how much you laughed versus how often you argued- that turns sentimental value into cold hard cash. In this intelligent, original and brilliantly candid part-experiment, part-memoir, comedian and performance artist Haley McGee recounts her romantic triumphs and failures with unflinching detail and a great deal of humour. (P) 2021 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd