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

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Finally, you’ve managed to make a success of writing about the highs and lows of love using your own life. Do you feel like you’ve chosen to avoid serious relationships for the sake of this writing? Do you foresee a point where you might stop?

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.” And 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.” 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. 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. But after that conversation with my dad, I thought about how all those hurtful things I went through had moulded me into a different person. One so much more confident about what she wants, so much happier with who she is. And in that moment, I was surprised to realise I wasn’t actually jealous of my dad for never having gone through heartbreak because, in enduring it, I changed so fundamentally I barely even recognise the person I was before. I found myself weirdly thankful for the worst thing that ever happened to me. How could I not be when I learned so much?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 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 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. 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. Notes on Heartbreak is her most exposing work yet and I am keen to learn about how a young writer, who has effectively turned her love life into her career, found the experience of offering up something as confusing, devastating and unedifying as heartbreak for public consumption.

Notes 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. And maybe we got lost in translation/Maybe I asked for too much/But maybe this thing was a masterpiece 'til you tore it all up… ” 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.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. 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

Arresting and vivid, raw and breathtaking…told with stunning originality’ DOLLY ALDERTON, author of EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE 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.”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. 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…” 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.” 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. It’s a book about the best and worst of love: the euphoric and the painful, the beautiful and the messy.

Corners of the brain that cause and respond to addiction can be activated by images or reminders of ex partners 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. 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.Some white blood cells monitor our moods, via our nervous system, and can listen out for heartbreak and loneliness, which in turn increases inflammation