I spent twenty-seven years in a relationship with a man who I fell in love with as a teenager, who I had three children with, who I shaped my life around. Confronting yourself in that way raises the question of whether you think there’s a risk in writing about relationships and dating when it necessarily involves interpreting men’s behaviour! It’s stirred up all these thoughts within me and even though I was desperate to keep reading it and just get on with it, I would dip in and out and then wander around with my thoughts for ages before repeating the process. it is an unflinchingly honest yet lyrical meditation on the simultaneous joy and pain of being in love that will resonate with anyone who has ever nursed a broken heart. I can’t stop thinking about how there’s no one there to know that I’ve gone for a bath, or for a walk, and as a result the act of doing one of those things, anything, starts to feel completely pointless.

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?Or maybe, like me, you’ll think you’re over your breakup and that reading this book will be a bit of entertainment while drinking tea and taking a break from life. daqueles livros que nos ajuda a perceber que é normal tudo aquilo que sentimos quando nos deparamos com uma desilusão deste tipo e que, independentemente de as coisas poderem ainda não fazer sentido, estamos no caminho certo. Sometimes scathing, often graciously understanding, it also captured a beautifully raw message of healing and growth after being so royally broken at the hands of the person who was meant to always be there to piece you back together. Vogue dating columnist Annie Lord's debut, Notes on Heartbreak, is a visceral yet funny recollection of the breakdown of her five-year-relationship, told in her distinctive, lyrical style . The idea for the book and the Vogue column both came from a viral essay you wrote about your breakup in the immediate aftermath.

Notes On Heartbreak is a seamless transition from columns to books for Annie Lord, who maintains her magnetic writing style over a longer form . Annie Lord’s writing manages to remain beautiful and poignant without falling into any cliché’s or tropes. Men say women aren't funny and I think that's because they need a badum-bum-tish punchline; they don't see that the humour is riddled through everything we say, so that evervone's always laughing a little bit. You’d think in these circumstances I’d think about him less, but at this point he’s on my mind almost constantly, like this bit of food stuck in my teeth that I can’t get out, that is giving me a headache from the way I curl my tongue around to try to get at it. It is an unflinchingly honest reminder of the simultaneous joy and pain of being in love that will resonate with anyone that has ever nursed a broken heart.And I don’t think that’s helpful sometimes because if you are just a victim and you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong, it does remove any agency because then you can’t do anything to make it right. I know a lot of reviewers who don’t like this, but for me, many of these books have turned out to be the absolute best of reads. 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. By the end of her notes, Annie makes commitments to herself to preserve individuality, recognising how we might be able to keep aspects of our lives without blending into theirs or a collective “ours. Knowing which recipes will taste like a Thursday night in with him, what songs will remind me of how we used to dance in the blue of the oven light until the neighbours told us to turn the music down.

I loved hearing how their romance built at university, flirting in libraries and skipping lectures just to be together. It’s the type of romance I always daydreamed about, but never experienced, and I actually loved being inside that world for a little bit. Writing about it really helped because it felt like I was still sitting in bed crying all day, but now it was also work.Dark, fierce and raw, Notes on Heartbreak is a love story told in reverse, starting with a devastating and unexpected break-up. I told myself it was because the book was almost four hundred pages long and I had been reading it in a week where I was working almost 38 hours and juggling way too many balls at once. Whether you’ve had a big defining heartbreak in your life, or a series of little heartbreaks that amount to one, you will find this work captivating and worthwhile.

The truth of it is that this book was unstitching me, tugging at things I thought I’d dealt with and resonating with me to the point of distraction. I’m not exactly gonna ring you every time I see a nice tree or have a friendly interaction with a bus driver. I think if I’d have read it while freshly heartbroken, I would’ve resented its existence, both for Annie Lord’s ability to get back on the horse, so to speak, and for that end message that I was so far from being able to see. She paints the very best and the absolute worst of love, not to mention all the chaos and exhilaration in between. It’s a book about the best and worst of love: the euphoric and the painful, the beautiful and the messy.That’s not a dig, by the way: it’s an observation she makes of herself in her debut book Notes on Heartbreak, a memoir about the disintegration of a five-year relationship, and it’s something she helpfully demonstrates within seconds of us meeting at her home in south London. It felt like this book was created for me, to help save me from my wallow and self pity in the wake of a recent, blindsiding breakup. Otherwise, it ends with them getting back together – which makes you feel so shit if you’re not able to.