Notes on Heartbreak: From Vogue’s Dating Columnist, the must-read book on love and letting go

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I learned that everything you are feeling, they are, too. It’s a shame you can’t talk to them about it, because you would have a lot in common. Problem is, you’d just end up sleeping together. A deep meditation on the anguish of a modern heartbreak, where Lord's unique writing helps the emotions fly.' - Guardian We talk about how it’s mainly women writing about the messy business of heartache and love and relationships, and how this kind of “confessional” narrative, where traumatic experiences are excavated, can sometimes be dismissed or sneered at. She remembers reading a review of the 1945 book On Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept about a doomed love affair, “and the guy was saying ‘oh, it’s so sentimental and rubbish and over the top’. But I love that it’s like that, and I wonder why putting lots of feeling into writing can sometimes be seen a negative thing? So yeah, I think if people look down on it for those reasons, it’s a form of snobbishness. I don’t think it’s a valid criticism.” Having said that, she thinks her next project is probably to be fiction. “My real life is too boring to get another book out of it.” But you must do this, because if you cling on too tightly to your memory of them you won’t be able to heal. Instead, you’ll be like a goldfish, continually hitting the side of its tank because its memory spans only three seconds, which is to say you’ll drunk-call them all the time, or turn up at parties you know they’re attending just so you can get their attention by laughing loudly at jokes that aren’t funny. A deep meditation on the anguish of a modern heartbreak, where Lord's unique writing helps the emotions fly * The Candid Bookclub, The Guardian *

And it’s through this inner dialogue that you become conscious of yourself as someone you can talk to and have a relationship with. I look at her now in that mirror and she’s me and I am her, and although we’re the same thing I see that we can talk to each other even if I will always know what’s coming because she, her, me, is the only thing I can count on to be there for the whole of my life.”She found herself resenting the easy way he carried himself while she was consumed by the trivia of their domestic life Why would I want to hear what was wrong when it’s already too late? Explanations amount to criticisms of a relationship I was desperate to stay in…”

I learned that gaining “closure” won’t heal anyone as much as you want it to. It’s a chance for the person who did wrong to unburden themselves of guilt. Finding out why either of you acted the way you did will probably only make the one suffering feel worse. And, again, you’ll just end up sleeping together. Broken heart syndrome’ can cause the heart’s left ventricle to change shape and get larger, weakening its muscle, meaning it doesn’t pump blood as well as it should Annie Lord’s writing manages to remain beautiful and poignant without falling into any cliché’s or tropes. Every line felt like it could only be crafted from her perspective, in her mind, with her words — which is what I love most about my favourite authors! Knowing that this particular style of writing could only come from them. If you’ve read her articles in Vogue, this book is only an extension of her ability to find a perfect balance between colloquial relatability and profound ideas. Society teaches us that love should be romantic, but it can come from friends, too. Friends bolster me and build me up, and being with them is like being in a support group. I already knew how great these women would be at helping me to cope. Listening to me cry down the phone, smiling and nodding as I diagnosed my ex with various mental illnesses despite having very little understanding of the symptoms. And through all this talking, I slowly came to terms with the idea that my relationship was over. Their conversation was so close to the themes and content of the book I’d just finished that later, as I left the train, I told the blue-haired woman that she must read it. “You have to read Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord when it’s out,” I said and instead of being annoyed that a random middle-aged stranger had eavesdropped on her conversation, she grasped the information like a life raft. “I will,” she said. “Thank you.”What kind of growth? “For me, the main thing is I became less reliant on other people, and stopped looking to others to bolster my sense of self,” she says. “I’m still working on that.” Has she a final word for the girl on the train, and anyone else going through their own heartbreak? “Even during the most painful times, there will be good days. You will still have fun. There will be mornings when you’ll wake up and not everything will feel like crap. Eventually, shafts of light will shine through.” Annie Lord: I think, at that point, all I could think about was the breakup. I write in the book about how distraction from a breakup doesn’t help at all. You just end up feeling like you’re thinking about it even more. So I could only write about the breakup, basically. Writing about it really helped because it felt like I was still sitting in bed crying all day, but now it was also work. It wasn’t something I consciously thought about like, ‘I will be open about this and help people.’ But I was really surprised when loads of people were enjoying it. Because I guess when you’re in a breakup, you always think whatever you’re going through is so unique and romantic and special and different. It was nice because everyone was saying, ‘oh my god, I felt exactly the same!’ but it was also frustrating: I was thinking, ‘did you [feel the same]? Because I think I was feeling it more!’

Heartbreak and rejection can trigger activity in the same area of the brain where physical pain is activated (the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex) It's good, all of this - nearly everyone knows the specific, towering grief of being walked out on by the person whose limbs they woke up tangled in in the morning, but few write about it so directly, so unblinkingly.' - The Times Annie Lord’s debut, a memoir called Notes on Heartbreak, is, as its title implies, about the breakdown of a five-year relationship, though it is also about more than that. This is a book about living in crap, overpriced house-shares in London, online shopping for things you know you will never wear, binge drinking, the gym, friendship, and why sometimes the only person who can possibly understand you is your mum. In other words, it is a book about being young and learning about the world, all told from Lord’s breathless but winningly down-to-earth point of view.

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I was 25 when my ex-boyfriend ended our five-year relationship outside King’s Cross station in London. It was a normal evening; we’d just been for a pint with my brother, and as we set off for the tube, my ex pulled me aside and said, “I want to be on my own.” At first I thought he was joking, and then I thought he was telling me he was moving out of our flat. The idea of him actually leaving me felt like an impossibility. Heterosexual women often have a cultural script to follow about breakups – one your book perhaps contributes to – where it’s like men instigate them either directly or by bad behaviour and then women process them – often with other women – and gradually recover a sense of lost agency. Do you think it’s easier, in some ways, for women to deal with breakups than men? Because there is almost like an archetype for what we’re supposed to think and feel and the process that we’re supposed to go through? It's good, all of this - nearly everyone knows the specific, towering grief of being walked out on by the person whose limbs they woke up tangled in in the morning, but few write about it so directly, so unblinkingly. * The Times *