I told Joe about my day in this much detail because he was another part of me, and if that other part of me didn’t know what I was doing it felt like only a fraction of an experience.

It was about 3,000 words and it was just a stream of consciousness of memories, a crazy mind map of what had happened so that I could make sense of it. I message other nearly sort-of-but-not-quite men and try to build some kind of scaffolding of attention that will prevent me from ever hitting the ground. Maybe he finds the end of summer sad, and rather than dealing with those emotions he transferred the negative feeling onto me, because getting rid of me was a quick way of changing up his life. I found myself welling up as she discussed their inside jokes, and how they crafted a language that only they both understood. Confronting yourself in that way raises the question of whether you think there’s a risk in writing about relationships and dating when it necessarily involves interpreting men’s behaviour!

I find that too often words fall short, reducing the overwhelming swell of feeling to an isolated sensation as though it was just one thing and not all of you at that moment. That's what Moll said the night I came home after he broke up with me and I didn't know what that meant except that something irreversible had been set in motion. It’s a book about the best and worst of love: the euphoric and the painful, the beautiful and the messy. Dark, fierce and raw, Notes on Heartbreak is a love story told in reverse, starting with a devastating break-up. I lived life all over again through him and learned each action’s merit through the response it pulled from his body.

Reading it on the other side of that stinging pain, though, brought a sense of camaraderie that we had both got through the worst of it, and, no matter how begrudgingly, that there was something to take forward from an experience we otherwise wish to strike from the record. It’s one of those books that unconsciously starts inhabiting all corners of your brain in such a beautiful, cathartic way. That’s not a dig, by the way: it’s an observation she makes of herself in her debut book Notes on Heartbreak, a memoir about the disintegration of a five-year relationship, and it’s something she helpfully demonstrates within seconds of us meeting at her home in south London.Yet, I regularly work weeks like this and my whole life is about juggling, so why, with a book I was enjoying so much, was it taking me so long to read? It's a sparkling and deliciously indulgent read which gets right into your chest and stays with you afterwards.

It’s stirred up all these thoughts within me and even though I was desperate to keep reading it and just get on with it, I would dip in and out and then wander around with my thoughts for ages before repeating the process. I’m not exactly gonna ring you every time I see a nice tree or have a friendly interaction with a bus driver. He must have been planning it for a while; no one breaks up with someone after five years on a whim. Then when I got into journalism I was told not to use ‘I’ and go out and talk to people and find interesting angles so it’s funny it’s gone back to writing about myself. One of the best things about being a book reviewer is receiving books from publishers that I would not normally have chosen for myself.Thank you for sharing your story so bravely and honestly, and I wish you much happiness as you keep moving on. um processo, muitas vezes longo, que obriga à desconstrução e construção constante de nós próprios até estarmos realmente bem. Annie Lord: I am someone that really likes to sit in a feeling and so after my breakup I really only wanted to read or watch things about breakups and every book I read was either a self-help book, like ‘let’s get you back on the horse,’ or began so long after the fact – maybe because the pain is so hard to describe.

Reading this felt like talking to a friend, like complaining together about the pain of heartbreak, sobbing over a glass wine in self-pity about how unfair it all is, but also shaking each other out of it, knowing that even if romantic love ends, there will always be people that love you outside of that. I spent twenty-seven years in a relationship with a man who I fell in love with as a teenager, who I had three children with, who I shaped my life around. As Annie Lord deals with her broken heart, the book constantly revisits the past, from the moment she first fell in love, to the months that saw the slow erosion of a bond five years in the making.it is an unflinchingly honest yet lyrical meditation on the simultaneous joy and pain of being in love that will resonate with anyone who has ever nursed a broken heart. Even when I said, ‘I don’t think I was very sympathetic to things he was going through,’ people would be like, ‘no, he’s a bellend,’ or whatever. Your book dramatises this and plays with literary form: for example, you intersperse the narrative with passages written in the second person, addressed directly to your ex. 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? Annie Lord: It’s really weird because when I was at uni, I had a column in the uni paper about sex and relationships, which I haven’t re-read because I think they’d be mortifying to read now.