The grief of heartbreak: How to survive losing the love of your life

On a train recently, I found myself earwigging on a riveting conversation between two young women who were travelling to a concert. They were talking about a break-up. A young, pretty, blue-haired woman was telling her brunette friend about how she’d been dumped. She and her ex had bought Billie Eilish concert tickets together months previously, and in his absence she was bringing her friend instead. “Did I not tell you I bumped into him?” the dumpee told her friend. “You didn’t?” her friend replied. “I did! It was good because I’d just had my hair done, it was really shiny,” she said. “He told me I was looking good and he never told me I was looking good when we were together. Like, ever.”

The book is cleverly structured and written with unflinching honesty

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.

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.”

A few days later I tell Lord about the girl on the train and how I believe Notes on Heartbreak, in which she tells readers every single, messy, gory detail of her break-up experience and the aftermath, will be comforting and helpful to anyone who has been dumped. Lord is on a Zoom call from her publisher’s office in London. “The thought of anyone reading the book and it helping them just makes me feel so happy,” she says smiling.

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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.

As she writes she’s searching for clues in the shipwreck of their relationship, trying to uncover what went wrong. It obviously helped that she had full permission from her ex to write about it and loving parents who “gave me permission to embarrass them”. In the first brutal weeks after the break-up, she licks her wound in her childhood home in Leeds, and in her grief, acts out so badly she remarks “how lucky I am to have people love me so much they let me hate them just in case it helps”.

“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.”

It was an article she wrote about her ex for Vice where she was a journalism intern a few years ago that brought her to the attention of her agent, which led to a book proposal and, within hours of it being submitted, a pre-emptive bid by her publisher Trapeze. “This pain is not unique,” she wrote back then. “Start typing ‘can you die from’ into Google, and ‘heartbreak’ is second only to ‘a hangover’. Everyone tells you getting over break-ups is like grieving but at least if Joe was dead, he couldn’t have his tongue inside someone else.” That article found its way into the book proposal.

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”.

“I definitely wanted to write something that took heartbreak as seriously as it feels,” she explains. “Because when I first went through it, I was looking for books that might help and they either begin way after the fact, when the person is going out and dating again, or they are like self-help books telling you to get back on that horse. I wanted to write something that really sat in the pain of it. The books I could relate to were about grieving, like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter.”

Her own grief in the book, as she comes to terms with losing the love of her life, is raw and dark. There’s a tsunami of tears and self-recrimination. And then the slow striving to move on, to live with the “chronic illness” of heartbreak. She ticks off every post-break-up response, from binge drinking to numb the pain to rebound sex and Instagram-stalking her ex. She even sleeps with Joe again a couple of times, which she says “definitely helped at the time”. She was processing everything as she wrote, so the book reads like a diary. There are sections in which she addresses her ex directly, as though writing him letters or continuing a one-sided conversation.

“When you break up with someone you always want to talk to them about what’s going on and I couldn’t do that, so in writing the book it felt like that dialogue was still open,” she says. “There’s a CS Lewis quote that I really like, from after his wife died, where he says grief is like suspense. He’d walk around the world, looking at things, wanting to tell his now-deceased wife about what he was seeing. And I felt like I was always doing that, wanting to talk to Joe about all these things. So that was kind of another reason for writing, I wanted to speak to him and it was a way of continuing the conversation.”

She found herself resenting the easy way he carried himself while she was consumed by the trivia of their domestic life

At first, it seems as though the break-up comes out of the blue but Lord, in the early parts of the book, is a bit like the classic unreliable narrator. Eventually the reasons Joe ended the relationship emerge. The couple’s codependency is laid bare, the fact that she lost herself in him or, as she puts it, “gave myself away”. She dissects how she became more of a mother figure than a girlfriend, criticising him for crimes such as leaving clothes on the floor or escalating minor disagreements. She talks about how clever he was, and how she wanted him to be more ambitious, encouraging him to apply for grants and courses he was not interested in. Only in this forensic analysis does it become clear that the break-up was not an unexplained, unfounded thing but a sad inevitability.

Towards the end, she describes a memory of how her ex would empty his pockets of the debris of daily life on to the bedside table without thinking to tidy it away, his head “too full of Friday-night plans” or new albums to listen to. She found herself resenting the easy way he carried himself while she was consumed by the trivia of their domestic life. “Why did he get to walk over the world as if so little bothered him, so light he seemed to float. The fact that we didn’t have a misting spray for our house plants didn’t itch at his bones. I was trying to make his life easier, but I could tell he’d rather have done without the help.”

She quotes Deborah Levy on parenting: “Yes there had been many times I called my daughters back to zip up their coats. All the same I know they would rather be cold and free.” The book is a wise meditation not just on break-ups, but on all intimate relationships and the things we get wrong in a misguided attempt to make everything right.

Lord says she “couldn’t let go of the rules” and meanwhile, her ex stopped bothering with them. Socks on the floor became a source of tension, culminating in an excruciating moment where she berates him for his messiness while he’s in the shower. She can’t let it go even as she’s thinking “I don’t want to be this person. I want to be the sort of girlfriend who gives blow jobs and gets high. You made me talk to you like this, I’m not your mother, your maid.” And still she kept the argument going.

No spoilers here, but the book has an intensely satisfactory ending, a phone conversation with her ex that is hopeful and healing and ultimately, full of mutual love. And another delight is Lord’s hilarious eye for detail and original powers of description. One man she dated on the rebound from her ex gives this as a reason why he can’t stay over: “I left my leftovers cooling in some Tupperware outside the fridge — it will go off if I leave it out overnight.” Another post-break-up sexual partner “swipes past my clit like he’s scanning items on the Sainsbury’s self-checkout machine”.

Along the way there are profound revelations about the nature of heterosexual relationships. “This is a problem so many women face,” she writes. “That of trying to make men care as much as they do.” Apart from the break-up narrative, Lord brings wisdom and insight about moving through the world as a young woman. Going out for the night, she’s nervous “that the eyes of one of the men I pass will leer up and down at my body until it feels like it’s no longer mine but his, but when none do I feel slightly deflated because when you spend your whole life being stared at, as young women do, when no one’s looking you wonder do you mean anything at all”.

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.

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.”

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

Having been through it and come out the other side, she believes even the messiest, most irrational parts of her post-break-up journey were necessary. She’d like other people to know that. “I’d say, if you need to cling on to certain illogical things, it’s okay. If you need to tell yourself that the break-up came from nowhere, that you were just too much for him or that you might get back together, that’s okay. And it’s okay if you make stupid decisions like having sex with him, it’s part of the process. There are very few people who make a clean break.”

She doesn’t feel she has written an instruction manual, “there’s no advice you can really give”. But she hopes her experience might help the heartbroken know their feelings are legitimate. She lists the phases she went through such as not being able to get out of bed, eating too little — she pined for him so hard she lost the belly fat that her ex used to love — or annoying friends by going on about her ex all the time. “I’d like people to know that’s all okay,” she says. “By the three-month mark, you’ll probably feel more human. In a year you’ll probably not think about it all the time. It’s such a long process but I’m glad I went through it, because while it’s intensely painful, you go through such an insane amount of growth in such a short period.”

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.”

Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord is published by Trapeze

How to survive a break-up

Advice from consultant psychologist Louize Carroll

Review

We need to slow down and review everything in the aftermath of a break-up. Connect with friends, patient friends, who will allow and assist you to dissect what happened. In time, check in with the kind of person you were in the relationship. Check to see if there were any parts of yourself that you sacrificed, and if so why? Can you invite these parts of yourself back?

Write

This is connected to your review phase. Write, write, and then write some more.

Put down your pain on the page. Write down the things you might feel you cannot say out loud. Process your pain on the page.

Take time for self-inquiry

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

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.