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

Product Information

Heartbreak is one of the most painful life experiences we have and we need to take it seriously for our mental and physical health’: science journalist Florence Williams. Photograph: Casie Zalud 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. Barely pausing for breath, the woman talked on, about her ex’s new girlfriend, how his friends were all surprised he’d moved on so fast. “His friends know I made him really happy, they don’t understand why he’s with her, she doesn’t make him happy and everyone can see that.” Then she paused. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to keep going on about it, am I boring you?” she asked her friend. “No!” her friend exclaimed. “Tell me every single detail.” And the young woman and her friend carried on, forensically analysing the break-up.

Your brain craves that person the same way you would cocaine’: Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak. Photograph: Issey Gladston 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.One of the best things about being a book reviewer is receiving books from publishers that I would not normally have chosen for myself. Books that wouldn’t have even been on my radar. 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. Notes on Heartbreak is exactly one of these. It’s a memoir, I guess, which is usually a hard no from me, but then it doesn’t read like a memoir, and it doesn’t follow the usual formula for memoirs either, and in some ways, it also nudges into self-help without actually being a self-help book. It reads like a novel, which was intuitively appealing to me, at times giving me Bridget Jones feels yet knowing all the while that, unlike Bridget Jones Diary, this was all true, not made up, and all the more powerful for it. To lay yourself open like this, it’s entirely impressive, and to do so with such introspection and intelligence as well. Annie Lord can write, wow, can she ever, and this book…well, it’s affected me more than I could have ever anticipated.

Here’s one of those quotes you could print and hang on the wall of your bedroom next to that small, misplaced mirror: 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.” 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. It’s through this inner dialogue that you become conscious of yourself as someone you can talk to and have a relationship with. (…) 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. (…) I experience another ‘over’, and this time it’s a promise, to keep on being nice to her. (…) because this life could be gorgeous if only I have myself permission to allow it.”A bible for the heartbroken, Notes on Heartbreak is brutal and honest and, simultaneously, a warm hug and a pull-yourself-together slap across the face. It’s a hard pill to swallow and it’s a good, long cry, the kind that leaves snot, not so much dripping but pouring from your nose. We’ve all been there, right? Writing about break-ups can be difficult because they’re so universal, but also deeply subjective. Your world might feel as though it’s collapsing, but to the next person, it’s just another break-up. If one person knows how to write about modern relationships and heartbreak though, it’s Annie Lord, Vogue columnist, VICE writer and now author of Notes On Heartbreak, her debut book, out today. She writes about intimacy in a way that’s relatable, poetic and makes you think that maybe your own heartbreaks are really as quietly earth-shattering as you thought they were. Annie Lord tells us a story at once both specific and universal' SHON FAYE, author of THE TRANSGENDER ISSUE

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!’Fierce, funny and raw, this unflinchingly honest exploration of heartbreak is so much more than a book about one single break-up It's a book about the best and worst of love: the euphoric and the painful, the beautiful and the messy. 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 * RTE Online * A book on love and loss to get the emotions (read: tears) flowing. One of this summer's most anticipated books' - Bustle 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.”

Who is Annie Lord? I rudely knew nothing about the writer when I bought this book, but instead chose it on a visceral recognition of the title and the cover image connections/disconnections - when the bed space, physical and metaphorical, feels too big after a relationship change beyond the one sides control - in that moment the choice is whether to adapt, accept, and keep on the onward journey (embrace the space as it were) or analyse and pull the brakes on, stroke the space and regret so much - reach out and notice the absence. When you love something so deeply and truly, you see all of its flaws was the quote that I was reminded of early on with this, and from that I found it hard to step away from this strangely paced, dirty and brutal, non veneered internal monologue. No regrets from similar thoughts, and even though I wasn’t able to relate to the different circumstances and time stamps this is set in, the feelings from the ride are always realShe writes about intimacy in a way that's relatable, poetic and makes you think that maybe your own heartbreaks are really as quietly earth-shattering as you thought they were... It's a sparkling and deliciously indulgent read which gets right into your chest and stays with you afterwards. It's someone else's story, but it will make you think about your own. * VICE * Dark, fierce and raw, Notes on Heartbreak is a love story told in reverse, starting with a devastating and unexpected break-up. As Vogue’s dating columnist, and a writer for publications including VICE and The Independent, Lord has become a leading voice on sex, relationships, and life in your twenties, known for her smoking area-type candour on topics from Hinge to ghosting. 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.