The Museum of Broken Relationships is a collection of ordinary objects hung on walls, tucked under glass, backlit on pedestals: a toaster, a child’s pedal car, a handmade modem. A toilet-paper dispenser. A positive pregnancy stick. A positive drug test. A weathered ax. They come from Taipei, from Slovenia, from Colorado, from Manila. All donated, each accompanied by a story: In the 14 days of her holiday, every day I axed one piece of her furniture.

One of the most popular items in the gift shop is the “Bad Memories Eraser,” an actual eraser sold in several shades. But in truth the museum is something closer to the psychic opposite of an eraser. Every object insists that something was, rather than trying to make it disappear. Donating an object to the museum permits surrender and permanence at once: you get it out of your home, and you make it immortal. She was a regional buyer for a grocer and that meant I got to try some great samples, reads the caption next to a box of maple-and-sea-salt popcorn. I miss her, her dog, and the samples, and can’t stand to have this fancy microwave popcorn in my house. The donor couldn’t stand to have it, but he also couldn’t bear to throw it away. He wanted to put it on a pedestal instead, honor it as the artifact of an ended era.

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When I visited the museum in Zagreb, Croatia — where it occupies a baroque aristocratic home perched at the edge of Upper Town — I was two and a half years married, two months pregnant, and traveling on my own. Almost everyone else had come as part of a couple. The lobby was full of men waiting for wives and girlfriends who were spending longer with the exhibits. I imagined all these couples steeped in schadenfreude and fear: “This isn’t us. This could be us.” In the guest book, I saw one entry that said simply: “I should end my relationship, but I probably won’t,” and fingered my own wedding ring — as proof, for comfort — but couldn’t help imagining the ring as another exhibit, too.

Before flying to Zagreb, I’d put out a call to my friends — What object would you donate to this museum? — and got descriptions I couldn’t have imagined: a clamshell drilled by a dental student, a shopping list, four black dresses, a single human hair, a mango candle, a penis-shaped gourd.

The objects my friends described all reached toward obsolete past tenses: that time we dreamed the same dream. The objects were relics from those dreams, as the museum exhibits were relics from the dreams of strangers — attempts to insist that these dreams had left some residue behind.

Walking through the museum felt less like voyeurism and more like collaboration. Strangers wanted their lives witnessed, and other strangers wanted to witness them. The curatorial notes quoted Roland Barthes: “Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator … [there is] no amorous oblation without a final theatre.” There was a democratic vibe to the place. Its premise implied that anyone’s story was worth telling, and worth listening to.

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The Museum of Broken Relationships began with a breakup. Back in 2003, after Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić ended their relationship, they found themselves in the midst of a series of difficult conversations about how to divide their possessions. As Olinka put it: “The feeling of loss … represented the only thing left for us to share.” Over the kitchen table one night, they imagined an exhibit composed of all the detritus from breakups like their own, and when they finally created this exhibition — three years later — its first object was one salvaged from their own home: the mechanical windup rabbit they’d called Honey Bunny.

Just over a decade later, the story of their breakup has become the museum’s myth of origins. “It was the strangest thing,” Olinka told me over coffee one morning. “The other day I was getting out of my car, right outside the museum, and I heard a tour guide telling a group of tourists about the bunny. He said: ‘It all started with a joke!’” Olinka wanted to tell the tour guide it hadn’t been a joke at all, that those early conversations had been deeply painful, but she realized that the story of her own breakup had become a public possession, subject to the retellings and interpretations of others. People took whatever they needed from it.

When Olinka and Dražen finally found a permanent home for their exhibition, the space was in terrible shape: the first floor of an eighteenth-century palace in utter disrepair, perched near the top of a funicular railway. “We were a little bit crazy,” Olinka told me. “We had tunnel vision. Like when you fall in love.” Dražen finished the floors and painted the walls, restored the brick arches. He did such a great job that people kept asking Olinka: “Are you sure you wanted to break up with this guy?”

That’s the pleasing irony of the museum’s premise: that in creating a museum from their breakup, Olinka and Dražen ended up forming an enduring partnership. From the museum coffee shop, the mechanical bunny was visible in its glass case — a presiding mascot and a patron saint. “People think that the bunny is our object,” Olinka told me. “But really the museum is our object. Everything that it’s become.”

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These ordinary objects understood that a breakup is powerful because it saturates the banality of daily life, just as the relationship itself did: every errand, every annoying alarm-clock chirp, every late-night Netflix binge. Once love is gone, it’s gone everywhere. It’s a ghost suffusing daily life just as powerfully in its absence. A man leaves his shopping lists scattered across your days, cluttered with personality tics and gratuitous periods, poignant in their specificity: “lg. black trash bags” summoning that time the trash bags were too small, or “lg. onion,” the type necessary for a particular fish stew prepared on a particular humid summer evening.

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“The museum has always been two steps ahead of us,” Olinka told me, explaining that it’s had a will of its own from the start, an impulse to exist beyond her and Dražen. In the decade after their first exhibition, the museum took many shapes: permanent installations in Zagreb and Los Angeles, a virtual museum comprising thousands of photographs and stories, and forty-six pop-up installations all over the world — from Buenos Aires to Boise, Singapore to Istanbul, Cape Town to South Korea, from the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam’s red-light district to the European Parliament in Brussels, all locally sourced, like an artisanal grocer, stocked with regional heartbreak.

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I grew up in a family thick with divorces and overpopulated by remarriages: both sets of grandparents divorced, my mother’s twice; both my parents married three times; my oldest brother divorced by forty. Divorce seemed less like an aberration than an inevitable stage in the life cycle of any love.

But in my family the ghosts of prior partners were rarely vengeful or embittered. My mother’s first husband was a lanky hippie with the kindest eyes who once brought me a dream catcher. My beloved aunt’s first husband was an artist who made masks from the dried palm fronds he gathered on beaches. These men enchanted me because they carried with them not only the residue of who my mom and aunt had been before I knew them, but also the spectral possibilities of who they might have become.

Which is all to say: I grew up believing that relationships would probably end, but I also grew up with the firm belief that even after a relationship was over, it was still a part of you, and that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. When I asked my mother what object she would contribute to the museum, she chose a shirt she had bought in San Francisco, years before I was born, with the woman she had loved before she met my father.

The gospel of serial monogamy could have you believe that every relationship was an imperfect trial run, useful only as preparation for the relationship that finally stuck. In this model, a family full of divorces was a family full of failure. But I grew up seeing them as something else, grew up seeing every self as an accumulation of its loves, like a Russian nesting doll that held all of those relationships inside.

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My breakup with Dave, at the end of my twenties, mattered more than any other breakup ever had, and lasted longer — the loss itself, and its aftermath. Dave and I had spent much of our relationship trying to figure out if our relationship could work, and I thought that breaking up would liberate us from that pull-and-tug. It didn’t. We broke up, got back together, broke up again, then talked about getting married. Our split became my partner the way Dave had been my partner. There was an absence that held his shape, and it followed me everywhere.

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In many ways, that relationship was another chapter in the unfolding story of my relationship with Dave, part of its epilogue. When the lawyer and I broke up, it felt less like a fresh sadness and more like a return to the sadness that was already there, missing the one I’d been missing all along. A few months later, I met the man I would marry.

Before I left for Croatia, I thought of bringing the bottle of Crystal Pepsi the lawyer had given me, to donate to the museum as a memento of my last breakup before marriage. But I never put it in my luggage. Why did I want to keep it at home, on my bookshelf? It had something to do with wanting to acknowledge the man who’d given it to me, because I hadn’t given him enough credit while we were together. Keeping his last gift was a way of granting him credit in the aftermath.

If I’m honest with myself, keeping that bottle of Crystal Pepsi isn’t just about honoring the man who gave it to me, or what we shared. It also has to do with enjoying that glimpse of sadness and dissolution, with holding on to some reminder of the pure, riveting feeling of being broken. These days my life is less about the sublime state of solitary sadness or fractured heartbreak and more about waking up each day and making sure I show up to my commitments. My days in Zagreb were about Skyping with my husband and emailing a good-morning video to my stepdaughter. They were about feeding the fetus inside me: Istrian fuzi with truffles, noodles in thick cream; sea bream with artichokes; something called a domestic pie; something called a vitamins salad.

Life now is less about the electricity of thresholds and more about continuance, coming back and muddling through; less about the grand drama of ending and more about the daily work of salvage and sustenance. I keep the Crystal Pepsi because it’s a souvenir from the fifteen years between my first breakup and my last that I spent in a cycle of beginnings and endings, each one an opportunity for self-discovery and reinvention and transformative emotion; a way to feel infinite in the variety of possible selves that could come into being. I keep the Crystal Pepsi because I want some reminder of a self that felt volcanic and volatile — bursting into bliss, or into tears — and because I want to keep some proof of all the unlived lives, the ones that could have been.

Jamison will be appearing in conversation with James Wood, critic and professor of the practice of literary criticism, Tuesday at 6 p.m. at Fong Auditorium at the Mahindra Humanities Center. Excerpt from “Make it Scream, Make it Burn” by Leslie Jamison. Copyright © 2019 by Leslie Jamison. Available from Little, Brown and Company, an imprint of Hachette Book Group Inc.