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

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Or maybe, like me, you’ll think you’re over your breakup and that reading this book will be a bit of entertainment while drinking tea and taking a break from life.

And I don’t think that’s helpful sometimes because if you are just a victim and you’ve done absolutely nothing wrong, it does remove any agency because then you can’t do anything to make it right. I think what Both Lord and Alderton are very good at is not making it as simple as ‘being in love isn’t worthwhile and friendship is the only love that matters in the end.

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.

What I loved about Notes on Heartbreak is that as Annie discovers and shares with such a raw and unbreakable truth is that this is okay. The person I’m speaking to directly [in those sections] is a really idealised version of someone and as time passes my view of them becomes a bit more realistic as I was able to handle the truth of it and see the situation as a three-dimensional thing.

The film ends and Moll gathers up her laptop and the blankets she brought down from the room she shares with Danny.

He must have been planning it for a while; no one breaks up with someone after five years on a whim.

Otherwise, it ends with them getting back together – which makes you feel so shit if you’re not able to. I noticed a lot of the literary references you cite in the book to express your feelings were originally written about grief as we traditionally understand it – linked to bereavement. Dark, fierce and raw, Notes on Heartbreak is a love story told in reverse, starting with a devastating break-up. Stopping and turning around under the shadow of a big glass office building, so nervous he was scraping the sole of one Reebok against the other.

I also think it’s wonderful how despite initiating the breakup, Annie really humanises Joe and doesn’t make him a villain we’re supposed to dislike.It reads like a novel, which was intuitively appealing to me, at times giving me Bridget Jones feels yet knowing all the while that, unlike Bridget Jones Diary, this was all true, not made up, and all the more powerful for it. It actually took me more than a week to read Notes on Heartbreak, which is quite a long time for me. 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.