Book review: Mr. Unavailable and the Fallback Girl

I recognized a few uncomfortable truths about myself as soon as I started reading Mr. Unavailable and the Fallback Girl by Natalie Lue, better known as NML, the voice of the blog Baggage Reclaim. While I admit I’m old-fashioned enough to prefer my books on paper rather than as a PDF download, this self-published e-book is one of the most no-nonsense guides I’ve found for women who are sick of trying to win over distant lovers and ready to learn how to stop playing their game.

Mr. Unavailable and the Fallback Girl starts out by introducing the main characters in the all-too-familiar drama:

Mr. Unavailable: He’s just what he sounds like — a man who’s not emotionally available, for whatever reason, to be in a committed, healthy relationship. He likes having a woman or several around when he’s lonely, bored, or looking for an ego stroke (or the other kind of stroke), but as soon as things get too serious for his tastes, he dances away to a medley of “My Way” and “I Wanna Be Free.”

The Fallback Girl: She’s the woman Mr. Unavailable depends on to accommodate his bad relationship habits. She honestly believes she wants a great relationship, but because she grew up with terrible relationship experiences, she doesn’t have the faintest idea what one feels like or how to get there. When Mr. Unavailable “falls back” on her, his crumbs of attention look to her an awful lot like a whole loaf.

From there it’s a brisk ride through the critical issues: how to spot and avoid Mr. Unavailable, what made him that way and why Fallback Girls find them so dangerously appealing, and how to break the attraction by ripping out the wiring behind it.

Granted, it’s not as though no one has ever written about emotional unavailability before. Somehow, though, Lue’s cheeky, charmingly British style helps the medicine go down in a more delightful way. She doesn’t stint on dosing readers with tough love, since Fallback Girls, she notes, “have a nasty habit of talking themselves into a bad situation.” She knows, from experience as a former Fallback Girl herself. To balance this out, she tends to say things like “Stop caring. Stop obsessing. Every last, damn, moment that you spend obsessing over this assclown is a complete and utter waste.”

In other words, if you’re looking for a bunch of hand-holding and advice on how to turn a frog into Prince Charming, look elsewhere. But if you’re ready to start breaking the connections between what you were taught about love when you were younger and the reasons you’re settling for substandard lovin’ today, pay your £12.50 ($20.62 at today’s exchange rate) to download 392 pages of bracing advice, and get to work. Mr. Unavailable and the Fallback Girl is no fairy tale, but it does give you a chance to write your own happy ending.

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