Annie Lord’s writing manages to remain beautiful and poignant without falling into any cliché’s or tropes. Every line felt like it could only be crafted from her perspective, in her mind, with her words — which is what I love most about my favourite authors! Knowing that this particular style of writing could only come from them. If you’ve read her articles in Vogue, this book is only an extension of her ability to find a perfect balance between colloquial relatability and profound ideas. 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. 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. This stunning exploration of love and heartbreak from cult journalist and Vogue columnist Annie Lord, is so much more than a book about one singular break-up. It is an unflinchingly honest account of the simultaneous joy and pain of being in love that will resonate with anyone who has ever nursed a broken heart. 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.

Your brain craves that person the same way you would cocaine’: Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak. Photograph: Issey GladstonAnd it’s through this inner dialogue that you become conscious of yourself as someone you can talk to and have a relationship with. 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.”

I’m not a very private person,” she clarifies unnecessarily, not very private being a useful trait for someone who writes about her sex and dating life in a column for Vogue. “And I also feel like I don’t have a lot of pride. I was having a conversation with friends over dinner the other day, and they were talking about someone cheating on them and what the worst part of that is, and my friend was saying, ‘it’s feeling like a mug and knowing other people know about it and you don’t.’ And I was thinking how that doesn’t embarrass me at all, because I don’t see those things as taking away from my value. So me being dumped and talking about these embarrassing things, I guess I just don’t see them as embarrassing because it doesn’t make me less than anybody else.” 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 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. 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 — Annie Lord

When she was approached about writing a book, it felt, she says, as though there was nothing else she wanted to explore more than the painful experience she had been grappling with. In the book she quotes Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, “Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me ... I ask for nothing but to live in my suffering”. There have been hundreds of studies into the beginnings of love, but why has it taken so long for scientists to investigate its end, this “clinically awful” state? “Science has become more sophisticated at looking at transcription factors in our genome,” says writer Florence Williams. “We are used to relegating heartbreak to cultural melodrama, like popular songs and romantic poetry. But heartbreak isn’t just melodrama. It’s one of the most painful life experiences we have and we need to take it seriously for our mental and physical health.” When Williams’s husband left her after 25 years, she felt “imperilled”. She was plodding through her days, managing to feed her kids and occasionally meet her deadlines as a science journalist, but constantly falling ill, getting thin, unable to sleep. At 50, she’d never experienced anything like it, this “disorienting sorrow, shame and peril”. Not only did she want to figure out what heartbreak was doing to her body, she wanted to work out how to get better. Would she be among the 15% of people who don’t recover after a major breakup? She set to work. 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…” 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. I thought love had to come from a boyfriend, but you can find it in friends too. They bolster me and build me up, and being with them is like being in a support group. Like having a bunch of sponsors you can call on when they’re needed.”

I learned you shouldn’t waste your time wishing parts of them away. Thinking things such as: if only they’d stopped putting so much emphasis on work; if only they’d stopped sending flirty texts to other people. There’s no point imagining it could have been different, because if that was the case, then they wouldn’t be themselves but another person entirely. Fierce, funny and raw, this unflinchingly honest exploration of heartbreak is so much more than a book about one single break-upBiological 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.” 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.” Notes on Heartbreak will probably be adored by the legions of fans of Dolly Alderton, who’s own wildly successful memoir Everything I Know About Love has recently been made into a television series. “I’m a big fan of Dolly and she’s been very supportive,” Lord says. I’ve wrote down several pieces from this book for myself. Things I understand and recognise myself, things I want to remember and things I wish for.

Annie Lord tells us a story at once both specific and universal’ SHON FAYE, author of THE TRANSGENDER ISSUE 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.” Accepting that there were two of you in the relationship and that the end was not necessarily all your fault can be a liberation. Relationships are nuanced and a product of two people’s entire life stories until that point. They are multifaceted and intricate and layered. We can still be sad about the end, whilst also beginning to recognise the complexity of love and loss rather than a prolonged and painful fixation on our own inadequacies. Róisín Ingle

Summary

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.” 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.