Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher studied people who had been dumped and found the parts of the brain activated were those associated with addiction. A person rejected feels the same kinds of pain and craving they might with drugs and alcohol – they go through withdrawal and they can relapse, too, many months later, a midnight phone call, a stone at a window. “All of this helped me realise what I was feeling was justified. That I was going through something clinically awful.” I learned that at some point you have to snap out of it, tie up your bootstraps and march on. Otherwise, you’ll be one of those people who begins sentences with: “My boyfriend, I mean ex-boyfriend.” At first, it seems as though the break-up comes out of the blue but Lord, in the early parts of the book, is a bit like the classic unreliable narrator. Eventually the reasons Joe ended the relationship emerge. The couple’s codependency is laid bare, the fact that she lost herself in him or, as she puts it, “gave myself away”. She dissects how she became more of a mother figure than a girlfriend, criticising him for crimes such as leaving clothes on the floor or escalating minor disagreements. She talks about how clever he was, and how she wanted him to be more ambitious, encouraging him to apply for grants and courses he was not interested in. Only in this forensic analysis does it become clear that the break-up was not an unexplained, unfounded thing but a sad inevitability. 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. Annie Lord released her debut book in 2022 and, if you've ever been through a breakup, it's sure to get you in your feels. This release charts the ups and downs of a long-term relationship and explores the ways it slowly began to come apart - all with a precise, unsparing eye. * COSMOPOLITAN *

Notes On Heartbreak is a seamless transition from columns to books for Annie Lord, who maintains her magnetic writing style over a longer form . . . Watch out for people crying, laughing and reciting passages to friends and family, as they cling to this book * THE HERALD * Although I haven’t experienced the breakdown of a long term (five year) relationship, I found it really interesting to understand a different experience to mine. 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. The way Annie talks about Joe is beautiful and made me tear up in public a few times, coming across like both a love letter to him and then herself. I found myself welling up as she discussed their inside jokes, and how they crafted a language that only they both understood. I also think it’s wonderful how despite initiating the breakup, Annie really humanises Joe and doesn’t make him a villain we’re supposed to dislike. I actually found myself falling a bit in love with both of them, and I could see how they meshed together so well. I was really happy when it seemed like they both felt happy and healed at the end, managing to maintain a friendship. Annie Lord: It’s weird actually, a couple of times I’ve spoken to male friends for the column and quoted them [about why men might behave a certain way in dating]. And when they say stuff, I’m never satisfied with what they’re saying. Sometimes I feel I’m like, ‘no, I get you more than you get you,’ or ‘yeah, that’s not it.’ It just feels like the explanation a lot of men use for stuff feels very simple. Maybe they are simple but it feels like it can’t be that. But sometimes you are making yourself feel better via a very complex explanation for [men’s] actions that make out that you’re still hot and desirable, and they still want to have sex with you, and go out with you. It's just these external factors [preventing it].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.” 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!’ A breakup is meant to be a sad thing, and it is. But I learned it can be an act of kindness, too. We weren’t right for each other. We wanted different lives and in letting each other go we’ve been able to let each other live those. He lives somewhere where he can eat breakfast on a balcony overlooking the sea, a place I would find boring. I go to exhibitions and take pictures of the descriptions by the pictures knowing I’ll have time and space when I get home to think about those thoughts in more detail.

Reading this book felt like cosmic intervention. 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. Like most people I tend to shy away from the ugly parts of myself, denying their existence from myself and others. But Annie Lord in her unflinching honesty shows that these ugly parts aren’t ugly at all. Reading about Annie Lord’s pain, jealousy, anger, sorrow, self-pity, regret, and numbness left me feeling connected to her in a way I haven’t felt with many books. 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 I learned there’s no point in anyone giving you advice, because nothing will make it better. Any sentence beginning with, “When me and my ex broke up …” is infuriating. Even worse is when people criticise your ex, because you’re still in love with them and feel it now more than ever. The only thing you might be slightly receptive to is hearing, “You will be OK.” There’s something soothing in the certainty of it, even if you don’t yet fully trust it. A breakup is meant to be a sad thing, but it can be an act of kindness, too. We wanted different lives. We can now live those The main issue, I have found, is that nothing ever goes anywhere. People flake and when they’re not flaking, you are. Finding love feels like trying to hold on to water. 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!Annie Lord tells us a story at once both specific and universal' SHON FAYE, author of THE TRANSGENDER ISSUE She doesn’t feel she has written an instruction manual, “there’s no advice you can really give”. But she hopes her experience might help the heartbroken know their feelings are legitimate. She lists the phases she went through such as not being able to get out of bed, eating too little — she pined for him so hard she lost the belly fat that her ex used to love — or annoying friends by going on about her ex all the time. “I’d like people to know that’s all okay,” she says. “By the three-month mark, you’ll probably feel more human. In a year you’ll probably not think about it all the time. It’s such a long process but I’m glad I went through it, because while it’s intensely painful, you go through such an insane amount of growth in such a short period.” Annie Lord: There is a weird thing that happens where something bad [in dating] happens and you’re already thinking about how you might write about them and your life feels like a story. It feels like not being in your life but seeing it as a spectator and recording it. I don’t feel embarrassed when I’m writing about myself because I’m a massive oversharer even in person, but it does affect how other people see me which is crap. I don’t want people to think I’m writing about them all the time. If men read the column they know what I think about so many things. It’s not very sexy because I can’t be mysterious. If you’re seeing a guy you want him to think you have loads of options, but that doesn’t work if he can read that you don’t. I think in the future I would still like to write about myself because I enjoy it but maybe it might be less dating-focused. That said, I’m obsessed with relationships and love. I think if I met the right person and they weren’t comfortable being written about I would give up the column, though that would be difficult because they’d probably say they were uncomfortable on about date three and I still wouldn’t know if I was going to fall for them enough to give it up? In your teens and early twenties, it feels like the career is the thing you should never give up on and nothing comes before that. Now I’m more established I think I could make something else happen if I didn’t have the column. Men are the disappearing, impossible thing now rather than work.

A deep meditation on the anguish of a modern heartbreak, where Lord's unique writing helps the emotions fly.' - GuardianNotes on Heartbreak is a love story told in reverse. It begins with Lord recalling the moment her boyfriend, called Joe in the book, broke up with her on the side of the road after a family dinner. “I want to be on my own,” he said before walking away, leaving Lord reeling from the sudden ending of the five-year relationship. The book is cleverly structured and written with unflinching honesty. Lord revisits the relationship from their first encounter on the way to a lecture at University in Newcastle to their first dates, a fantastic sex life and comfortable domesticity after they moved in together.