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

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Annie scatters in a few references to other literary works, like bell hooks’ all about love, or Plato’s theory on love and soulmates, and The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, but nothing feels forced or clunky. The intellectual references perfectly blend in to the writing, which actually seems really difficult to achieve but Annie made it look easy. Sometimes that kind of shift in tone could dangerously fall into coming across like two different essays that have been copy and pasted together, but Annie completely avoids this, with every reference feeling useful and adding to the writing. It wasn’t just a ‘look how many clever books I’ve read and can insert here!!!’ I feel like I learnt a lot about love that I didn’t consider before. 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. Perhaps we can carry on loving each other, even when miles of air and experience seperate us. Not in the way of wanting to wake up in the same bed. Or needing to speak to each other when something goes wrong. But as a quiet love that endures out of respect for the impact he had on my life.” 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.”

The idea for the book and the Vogue column both came from a viral essay you wrote about your breakup in the immediate aftermath. Why did you decide to write that at the time? It’s true that going out and dating others provides a distraction that brings with it some pain relief. It’s like an analgesic, Solpadine in human form. But just like that drug, it can get addictive and actually stops working in the same way after a while. What we actually need to do after heartbreak is to take some time getting to know ourselves in this new form, gently observing the hurt and anger we feel and the thoughts running through our minds. We need to take time to untangle ourselves from the “why” and from the narratives we create to provide an explanation that makes sense to us. Accept the complexity of people

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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.” 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. But it was reading about the science of heartbreak that had the biggest impact. “Saying, ‘I’m going through a breakup’ didn’t do what I was feeling justice. It felt too small, too ordinary.” So Lord sought out studies, learning things like, “The way your breathing adjusts to another person’s when you’re together for a long time, how in grief some people’s hearts really do break, or the fact that your brain craves that person the same way you would cocaine.”

Here’s one of those quotes you could print and hang on the wall of your bedroom next to that small, misplaced mirror: This is a love story told in reverse. It’s about the best and worst of love: the euphoric and the painful. The beautiful and the messy. 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?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. Just as easily as our relationship reached that place without surprises, the end of it has too. Heartbreak is like a chronic illness I have learned to live with. 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 have mantras to repeat to myself when it gets bad. He’s not having as much fun as you think he is. You only miss him this badly right now because of hormones.

There will always be things only your ex would get, such as how typical it is that your parents have rearranged the living room so it “feels more open” even though now none of the sofas point towards the TV. You could try telling them but, for the third time, you will just end up sleeping together. 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. 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.

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. Your brain craves that person the same way you would cocaine’: Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak. Photograph: Issey Gladston 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…”