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

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The intellectual references perfectly blend in to the writing, which actually seems really difficult to achieve but Annie made it look easy. I find myself merging my own experience into Lord’s particular take on something; it’s as if you try her perspectives on for size, regardless of whether you think they’ll actually fit you.

Yet, I regularly work weeks like this and my whole life is about juggling, so why, with a book I was enjoying so much, was it taking me so long to read? What is a bigger FU to your ex than penning and publishing a successful memoir that charters every fracture, ache, and rebound of your breakup? I was really happy when it seemed like they both felt happy and healed at the end, managing to maintain a friendship. Charting her attempts to move on, Annie explores the ups and downs of being newly single, from disastrous rebound sex to sending ill-advised nudes, stalking your ex's new girlfriend on Instagram and the sharp indignity of being ghosted.If he hasn’t that doesn’t really matter either because I’ll just pretend that he can’t watch my story as it will make him miss me too much.

I think breakups are often about repeated attempts to draft and redraft a satisfactory narrative of why a relationship played out the way it did until, ultimately, you just stop caring. It’s been almost two years now, and my life is so much better than I ever thought it would be, and despite the pain and anger that the end brought to my life, and to that of my almost adult children, I have no regrets.One of the best things about being a book reviewer is receiving books from publishers that I would not normally have chosen for myself. 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. 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. I find that too often words fall short, reducing the overwhelming swell of feeling to an isolated sensation as though it was just one thing and not all of you at that moment. That’s why there’s denial at first, then guilt, then anger and bargaining, and then there’s depression when you finally start to work through what happened.

Annie Lord: It’s really weird because when I was at uni, I had a column in the uni paper about sex and relationships, which I haven’t re-read because I think they’d be mortifying to read now. We feel Annie's pain with her, join her as she begins to heal, and cringe or laugh in recognition of our own experience as Annie charts her attempts to move on, from disastrous rebound sex to sending ill-advised nudes, stalking your ex's new girlfriend on Instagram and the sharp indignity of being ghosted. 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. The person I’m speaking to directly [in those sections] is a really idealised version of someone and as time passes my view of them becomes a bit more realistic as I was able to handle the truth of it and see the situation as a three-dimensional thing. I suppose I’m anxious, but it feels more like excitement, anticipation, as though I’m off to a house party later or going on holiday in the morning.Even thinking about my male friends… I was actually listening to an episode of The Receipts podcast where Tolly says something like, ‘A relationship’s only over when the woman’s done with it. I did try to really confront ways in which I fucked things up: like not setting boundaries or cutting myself off from friends or being needy. Then when I got into journalism I was told not to use ‘I’ and go out and talk to people and find interesting angles so it’s funny it’s gone back to writing about myself.

Reeling from a broken heart, Annie Lord revisits the past – from the moment she first fell in love, the shared in-jokes and intertwining of a long-term relationship, to the months that saw the slow erosion of a bond five years in the making.Because, twenty-seven years is a long time, and despite the indifference and anger that peppered the years, that one person was, throughout, my confidant, the one who shouldered the burden of life that I couldn’t carry. It's a sparkling and deliciously indulgent read which gets right into your chest and stays with you afterwards. 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. Actually, the fear of boring my friends to death isn’t the only reason I don’t talk about these tiny offshoots of experience anymore.

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