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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. Annie Lord: I think, at that point, all I could think about was the breakup. I write in the book about how distraction from a breakup doesn’t help at all. You just end up feeling like you’re thinking about it even more. So I could only write about the breakup, basically. Writing about it really helped because it felt like I was still sitting in bed crying all day, but now it was also work. It wasn’t something I consciously thought about like, ‘I will be open about this and help people.’ But I was really surprised when loads of people were enjoying it. Because I guess when you’re in a breakup, you always think whatever you’re going through is so unique and romantic and special and different. It was nice because everyone was saying, ‘oh my god, I felt exactly the same!’ but it was also frustrating: I was thinking, ‘did you [feel the same]? Because I think I was feeling it more!’ 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.
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. 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. Biological 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 you must do this, because if you cling on too tightly to your memory of them you won’t be able to heal. Instead, you’ll be like a goldfish, continually hitting the side of its tank because its memory spans only three seconds, which is to say you’ll drunk-call them all the time, or turn up at parties you know they’re attending just so you can get their attention by laughing loudly at jokes that aren’t funny.
Summary
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. 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. When I read these words by Annie Lord last year, I didn't believe her. Heartbreak makes us selfish, inward-looking creatures who believe that our pain is so large, surely no one else had ever felt this way before, and surely there is no way out. Perhaps no one ever forgets anyone. We keep parts of them inside us forever and they come out in the moments we need them. Like ghosts who can’t find their way to the afterlife.” 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.”
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”. 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. Who is Annie Lord? I rudely knew nothing about the writer when I bought this book, but instead chose it on a visceral recognition of the title and the cover image connections/disconnections - when the bed space, physical and metaphorical, feels too big after a relationship change beyond the one sides control - in that moment the choice is whether to adapt, accept, and keep on the onward journey (embrace the space as it were) or analyse and pull the brakes on, stroke the space and regret so much - reach out and notice the absence. When you love something so deeply and truly, you see all of its flaws was the quote that I was reminded of early on with this, and from that I found it hard to step away from this strangely paced, dirty and brutal, non veneered internal monologue. No regrets from similar thoughts, and even though I wasn’t able to relate to the different circumstances and time stamps this is set in, the feelings from the ride are always real Over time, there will be moments when they become this formless image like the ones you see in dreams. At this point, you will think you have forgotten, until sometime later when you do something so unbelievably them, so typical of who they were – such as stopping outside an estate agent’s and looking at the houses you can’t afford or making a neeeeowwwwww noise when a bike speeds past. And you will realise you cannot lose them even if you wanted to, because they’re part of you for ever in the way that you walk, talk, sleep, breathe. 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
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.
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 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.” 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.”
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. 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.” 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.” 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. Well, spoiler: there is a way out, it does end, and even though heartbreak feels so uniquely targeted and personal, it's probably one of the most universal feelings. Heartbreak ends, and love comes to find us once again. Credit to Annie Lord for capturing and sharing this feeling through her writing. An admirable feat to say the least.
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