“Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don’t.”

Few things tear us apart like heartbreak. Sometimes it feels impossible to imagine a time when it doesn’t hurt to think of them… let alone imagine a time when you don’t think of them at all.

There are no quick ways to heal from a breakup and move on. Time and no contact are the only real strategies. But that said, while you’re working on those, there are lots of good books to read during a breakup to start guiding you back to yourself.

My last breakup was thankfully several years ago. As I wrote about in Mountain Song, my book about living alone by the Swiss Alps, I ended up reuniting with that person (and more recently, marrying them). But when I think about that breakup and others before, I still remember the pain that I thought would never end. And yet, it somehow did.

After my worst breakups, I sought out books to guide and comfort me, but also to remind me that I wasn’t the only person who had ever suffered from a broken heart. I read to remind myself that I would get through this – and even emerge stronger.

Here are some of the best books to read when you’re going through a breakup and your heart is broken. Treat yourself to one or two books that stand out, give yourself a day of self-care to soak in their wisdom, and allow yourself double the kindness and patience you think you need. Things will get easier. I promise.

8 of the best books to read after a breakup to start healing

1. The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim

The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down is one of the books that helped me to put the pieces of my life together during my last breakup. It’s a book of such gentle comfort, kindness, and wisdom, accompanied by stunning illustrations.

It’s a lovely guide not just to romantic relationships, but to approaching life with an open heart, kindness, and curiosity.

“When trust is shattered, when hopes are dashed, when a loved one leaves you, before doing anything, just pause your life and rest a moment. Surround yourself with close friends and share food and drink. Watch a silly movie. Find a song that speaks to your heart. Go somewhere you’ve always said you wanted to go – the Grand Canyon, the Camino de Santiago, Machu Picchu. All by yourself. Just you and the road. After spending time alone, go to your own sacred space. Close your eyes and clear your mind. Invoke the heart of compassion and feel the embrace of acceptance. Downcast and heartbroken, I know you were once me and I was once you. So today, I pray for you.”

The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down

2. How to Love by Thich Nhat Hanh

I’m so grateful for the lessons I’ve learned from How to Love. In this little book from Thich Nhat Hanh’s “How to” series, learn from the master of mindfulness not just how to heal from a breakup, but how to open your heart and cultivate thriving relationships.

On a particularly hard day during my last breakup, I bought myself a small, pretty-patterned notebook and spent a morning filling it with the quotes that resonated with me from How to Love and The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down. It became my guidebook for feeling better.

“It’s important that loving another person doesn’t take priority over listening to yourself and knowing what you need.”

How to Love

3. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

If you haven’t read The Midnight Library yet, recovering from a breakup is a good time to change that. It’s a book about the infinite number of directions a life can take: all of the people we can end up with, the careers we can pursue, the trips that can change us, and the individuals we become.

It’s a book about regret, but also about the inevitability of regret in any life. We will never know what’s on the road we don’t take or in the life that doesn’t work out.

“We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

The Midnight Library

4. Circe by Madeline Miller

In a Reddit thread about how to get over an ex and feel like yourself again, user mostly_drowning recommended Circe, sharing that: “it helped me cope with loneliness and it is an overall poignant and compelling read. Can’t recommend it enough.”

This is Madeline Miller’s first novel, a bestselling and spellbinding book about the daughter of the sun god Helios, who’s banished to the remote and wild island of Aiaia after disobeying the gods. Alone (mostly) in confinement, Circe rebuilds her life – and finds more strength than she could have believed was possible.

“I had told myself that when he was away I would do all the things I had set aside for sixteen years. I would work at my spells from dawn until dusk, dig up roots and forget to eat, harvest the withy stems and weave baskets till they piled to the ceiling. It would be peaceful, the days drifting by. A time of rest.”

Circe

5. You Can Heal Your Heart: Finding Peace After a Breakup, Divorce, or Death by Louise Hay and David Kessler

In You Can Heal Your Heart, self-help bestseller Louise Hay and grief and loss expert David Kessler explore how we can heal from grief and rediscover peace, including after a breakup. On Reddit, user g00d-gir1 describes it as “a game changer on how to look at past relationships”.

“‘Our thinking creates our experiences,’ she began. ‘That doesn’t mean the loss didn’t happen or that the grief isn’t real. It means that our thinking shapes our experience of the loss.’”

You Can Heal Your Heart

6. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb

In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, therapist Lori Gottlieb shares the story of when she realised that she was in desperate need of therapy herself: after an unexpected breakup left her feeling lost and devastated. As Gottlieb explores the inner lives of her patients, she finds that the questions they’re struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to her own therapist.

In a thread about books for breakups on Reddit, aspiringpsychologist shared about Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: “It really helped me through my own break up. I felt like there was so much to relate to and it felt so cathartic.”

“Relationships in life don’t really end, even if you never see the person again. Every person you’ve been close to lives on somewhere inside you. Your past lovers, your parents, your friends, people both alive and dead (symbolically or literally)–all of them evoke memories, conscious or not.”

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

7. The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

I recommended The Course of Love to a friend today, which is what made me think of writing this post. I’ve encouraged so many people to read the novel in the last few years. It should be required reading, really. It’s fantastic.

The Course of Love is philosopher Alain de Botton’s fictional, philosophical, and psychological exploration of what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence.

“Pronouncing a lover ‘perfect’ can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.“

The Course of Love

8. Your Life in Bloom by Lucy Fuggle

This is the book I wrote during a period of depression and a turning point in my work during the pandemic. I was also coming to terms with saying goodbye to people who had meant a lot to me. I wanted to remind myself how I had navigated heartbreak in the past – and how I would again.

It’s a short little book full of musings on finding your way. I hope it can bring you some comfort if you’re going through a breakup and putting the pieces of your life back together.

“When you’re waiting for that person to call and they don’t. When you want them to miss you and you’re the only one suffering. When you’re tearing yourself apart for someone who will never know how much it hurts. Feel the depths of it all and look across the shore for what’s on the other side: your peace, love, and joy. Every heartbreak is for something. Each time you reach a new low, you find your next phoenix moment; your chance to emerge stronger and more courageously vibrant than ever before. Know it’s coming.”

Your Life in Bloom by Lucy Fuggle

The post 8 of the best books to read during a breakup to heal your heart appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.

As a teenager I worked in my village bookshop; a tiny little shop stacked floor to ceiling with books, its shelves overflowing onto every table and windowsill. I loved working there. I’d track down rare books for customers and process purchases when they came into the shop.

My job was also to recommend books. We all had go-to recommendations: mine leaned towards the classics, while the bookshop owner always recommended Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

Somehow I never read the book back then. I really should have, though.

“According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.”

Cutting for Stone tells the tale of two identical twins, Shiva and Marion, who are conjoined until birth but remain “ShivaMarion” throughout life, even after bitter betrayal separates them.

Marion is our narrator of Cutting for Stone, who sets the scene in Addis Ababa’s Missing Hospital (a mispronunciation of “Mission Hospital”). He opens the novel with these first lines:

“After eight months spent in the obscurity of our mother’s womb, my brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths at an elevation of eight thousand feet in the thin air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia…”

It’s a big book at 534 pages and in the ground it covers; from beginning to end, it spans lifetimes, including countless personal, national and international upheavals in those years.

I loved reading Cutting for Stone for a few reasons. I loved how it celebrates knowledge, learning, and especially, medicine. I loved it for the non-traditional home that Shiva and Marion grow up in (“Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted.”)

I loved it for how it made me think about my own life and work. If you want to consider switching careers to medicine, read this for a little push. I had a not-insignificant career crisis while reading this book, lamenting how I could be using my brain for more impactful work.

For me, books that bring up feelings like these are among the very best; causing you to question your life and start making real changes, whether it’s pivoting your career, making changes to look after your body better, or improving relationships and leaving negative ones.

I loved getting to know its characters, not because they’re excellent role models – they have many unappealing moments, especially in the second third of the book – but because they’re so flawed. Not one character is perfect or blameless.

Although the book starts off slow, by the halfway point I knew it was going to be one of my all-time favourites. If there’s a formula for a perfect novel, Abraham Verghese nails it with Cutting for Stone.

“God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by–by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.”

The post Cutting for Stone is a book I should have read years ago appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.

“Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves”. – Nick Cave

Things fall apart. We grieve and feel a deep well of hurt inside of us. We feel stuck, wondering if this is just how it will be from now on. But then, ever so slowly, we start to put ourselves back together again. We look at where we are and we take stock. Day by day, we rebuild a life; albeit a very different one from before. We survive.

Poorna Bell knows the lines and contours of the pain of grieving. Her memoir, In Search of Silence, is a powerful story of love, loss, and rebuilding a life on new ground. It starts with the saddest of endings and new beginnings: her husband, Rob, taking his own life after years of addiction and depression.

Poorna knows that she can’t carry on the same life in London. Nor can she continue business as usual in the leadership team of HuffPost UK.

“There comes a point, whether through death, loss, illness or heartbreak, when you are forced to take inventory of your life”, writes Poorna. “I loved my life in London, but there were parts of it I wasn’t happy with, that I needed to question.”

“You look about your life, and you realise that you don’t recognise the things in it. They no longer fit the person you are.”

Instead of continuing as before, Poorna ponders the coordinates where she can think about building a new life. Cutting across remote landscapes in India, New Zealand and Britain, Poorna questions why we seek other people to fix what’s inside of us – and builds her own authentic healing pathway instead.

“It was not as simple as leaving my current life and buggering off around the world. Unless you are good at compartmentalising or medicating your life, your troubles, your sadness, your disappointments do not operate to postcodes, latitudes or longitudes.”

Poorna is conscious of the comparisons to Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestseller about travelling for self-discovery (a book that I personally think gets a bad rep, Elizabeth Gilbert’s a wonderful author).

Yet Poorna’s trip is less about escape and more about return, including to India, as one place she calls home, and to New Zealand, where her late husband grew up and his family live. She realises that her adventures can’t be a temporary distraction or way to pacify her, even if they could be.

“I didn’t need spiritual awakening. I didn’t need travel to save me or show me how lucky I was. This was about me taking my life in my own hands and willing this new version of myself into existence.”

Along the way, Poorna retreats into nature. She relishes “the frequency that truly peaceful places emit, their sound created in the lapping of waves and the language of birds”. It’s in these places that she feels at home and at peace.

“The reason I love trekking, or rather, being around mountains, is that there is no hiding from my bullshit. I can’t get on my phone to distract me from an uncomfortable thought. There is a lot of thinking to do, and it happens at its own pace and timeline”.

Poorna shares something that all of us who love the outdoors can relate to: “Being here, in this landscape, forces a change. In the spaces of silence we finally hear a voice that is our own. It comes unbidden, softly, willingly, not through trauma or coaxed through the words of a therapist or a friend delivering tough love”.

She continues with one of my favourite quotes from the book:

“Mountains offer a gentler path to understanding yourself, without the need for a catastrophe.”

As she wills the new version of herself into existence, one word strikes loud and clear in the quiet headspace she finds: writer.

“I always knew I was going to become a writer, not because I had a romantic notion of bashing away on a typewriter with pencils twisted in my hair, but because, as early as I can remember, it’s what I did.

In the same way that reading books was a conduit into wonderful new worlds that I could go and live in for a while, where I trod on their soil and breathed their air, writing helped me articulate how I related to the world.”

By escaping the echo chamber of corporate London and following where her past, present and future selves lead her, Poorna finds the frequency of her own voice. She finds where she wants to be.

“I didn’t expect to fix my sadness, but I wanted to create an inner reservoir of calm and quiet that I could draw on whenever I was in need”, writes Poorna, channelling my go-to Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius.

Poorna also finds a new understanding of love, far from narrow definitions restricted to romantic couplings:

“I understand why people think the only thing that can fix a heart broken by love is another love equal or greater in magnitude. But that doesn’t have to come from just one other person. When you think about all of the love you will ever experience in your lifetime, including that which you have for yourself, that is still an immense foundation to build your life on.”

In Search of Silence teaches us to escape the echo chambers that fog up our view of who we are and how we wish to spend our lives. It gives us a more expansive definition of love, one that values self-love no lower than any other form. It reminds us that things end and things begin. And it comes down to asking these questions:

“Are the lives we have the ones we want, or the ones we felt pressured to have? Do we really want those things, or would we have done things differently? What is our own thought, our own hope, and what is the echo of everyone else’s?”

As of May 2019, In Search of Silence is available now to pick up, curl up with, lose yourself in, and – like all great stories – come out slightly different on the other side of.

The post Taking inventory of your life after loss and heartbreak with Poorna Bell’s In Search of Silence appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.

There are a few reasons for this. One, it’s probably my favourite poem by Auden: I first encountered it during my second year of university, and the poem and my lecturer’s explanation of the consoling nature of some of Auden’s poetry after 9/11 stuck with me.

The poem was written by Auden in December 1938, after Kristallnacht on 9-10 November had shattered shop and synagogue windows, hopes, and lives in Nazi Germany.

The poem describes Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting by Pieter Brueghel, and it echoes how the old master depicts Icarus falling from the sky while everyone else, involved in other things or just simply not wanting to know, “[turn] away / quite leisurely from the disaster” and go about their day.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, now seen as a good early copy of Pieter Bruegel’s original.

When we are suffering, I think it might feel a bit like this: that others are now turning away from us, even if that isn’t entirely the case.

And when others are suffering, perhaps we sometimes feel ourselves turn away slightly too.

The poem begins, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

I think Auden encapsulates something timeless here: that common human fear that something bad will suddenly happen at some meaningless time of day, when everything else is progressing as normal. And the concern is entirely grounded.

Perhaps the answer here is nurturing a greater sense of mindfulness, both in paying attention to the good stuff when life is going well, and noticing those that are suffering around us. It could also help us to approach harder times in a way that doesn’t necessarily make it easier for us, but rather helps us to take in all aspects in a more present way.

Will Schwalbe mentions the poem in The End of Your Life Book Club, a non-fiction biographical book I’ve mentioned so many times before. While his mother was facing cancer, he described how he felt like the “someone else” who was “eating or opening a window or just walking dully along” in Auden’s poem. As he writes, “Mom was suffering; I was going on with my life”.

Yet “Musée des Beaux Arts” somehow helped him to acknowledge this feeling – that it’s the normal response to feel like this – which, perhaps, may have allowed him to be more present with his mother. Finding simple understanding of our own feelings or fears in fiction can be a great help.

The post On going about your own life when a loved one is suffering: W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.

I was very saddened to hear the news of Nick Cave’s son; the family facing a tragic accident not far from where I live in Sussex. It reminded me of the musician’s selection for the Poems That Make Grown Men Cry anthology (edited by Anthony and Ben Holden): “The Widower in the Country” by Les Murray.

Nick Cave writes how this “very sad poem of loss revolves mournfully” around the death of the farmer’s wife, which remains unmentioned as we follow him through his “dire and ineffectual day’s work”.

I’ll get up soon, and leave my bed unmade.
I’ll go outside and split off kindling wood,
From the yellow-box log that lies beside the gate,
And the sun will be high, for I get up late now.

It’s the unmade bed and the “I get up late now” that gives away so much. Cave sees the farmer as “that tough old Australian man, so familiar to me, just getting on with the business of life”, but views “the violence of the last two lines, that screaming unconsciousness” as the part of the poem that “really brings on the waterworks”:

Last night I thought I dreamt – but when I woke
The screaming was only a possum ski-ing down
The iron roof on little moonlit claws.

It is hard to put words to sad situations like this, but poetry might get close. After all, poems can’t always provide solace, but often we can find something close to what we’re facing.

My favourite Nick Cave Album? The Lyre of Orpheus half of the Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus double album by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. I’m unsure how O’Children could be more beautiful.

You can read “The Widower in the Country” (1963) by Les Murray in full here and find other superb poetic selections in the Poems That Make Grown Men Cry anthology by Anthony and Ben Holden.

The post Nick Cave’s chosen “sad poem of loss”: “The Widower in the Country” by Les Murray appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.

Lately I’ve been reflecting on good poems to learn by heart, and “In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver has caught my attention. I think this piece is applicable to both life’s challenges and quieter plateaus, so I’d say it fits my unwritten requirements for memorised verse.

I know that the following lines will help me with grief and loss when it comes, and help me get back to what’s really important when things are hectic:

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

There’s something I find so calming and freeing about reading this. As if the pressure is taken off for a moment. Mary Oliver neatly summarises something I often forget – that letting go is always possible in some sense.

Whatever it is we’re letting go of, and however we’re going to go about doing it, I think Mary Oliver can be a great mentor for the process.

You can read the full poem of “In Blackwater Woods” here, or you can find it in the American Primitive anthology. You can also read my article on waking up early with the help of Mary Oliver.

The post Poetry for Letting Go: In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.

Tolstoy with his bicycle, next to his wife.

Tolstoy was sixty-five when he took up bicycling on a British-made “safety bicycle” just coming into fashion in Russia.

He began taking lessons held in the Moscow Manège, a long classical building used for parades (where he’d also learned to fence). After showing the police his proficiency, he obtained a license that let him cycle around the city as he pleased.

He would cycle with an intense look of concentration on his face, and would generally cycle alone.

The grief of Leo Tolstoy

In the days before his seventeenth birthday, Tolstoy’s adored son Vanechka had died of scarlet fever. His daughter Masha wrote to a friend,

“Mama is grief-stricken […] Her whole life was in [Vanechka], she gave him all her love. Papa is the only one who can help her, he’s the only one who can do that. But he is suffering terribly himself, and keeps crying all of the time.”

It hit him as hard as his brother Nikolay’s death in 1860, and Tolstoy saw cycling as a kind of “innocent holy foolishness” that allowed him to deal with his grief. He took his bicycle to Yasnaya Polyana – the family estate – during the summer, and would exhaust himself cycling to Tula and back (a fourteen-mile trip).

Was it innocent, foolishness, or both?

A Cycling Notes entry in Scientific American for April 18, 1896, included the following:

Count Leo Tolstoi, the Russian novelist, now rides the wheel, much to the astonishment of the peasants on his estate.

One can only imagine what his wife Sonya thought of this new obsession, but it was surely preferable to the deep depression he often fell into between novels. Tolstoy once wrote,

“I felt that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped.” 

A reflection on Tolstoy’s new hobby

I guess I’m like Tolstoy in that I need to keep busy. I like being alone, but I don’t like having too much time alone with my thoughts: it only seems to get me down and makes me over-analyse. Journaling does help, but I don’t like to dwell too much on a problem. Having something to work and improve upon keeps your mind occupied and provides entertainment, and I can absolutely empathise with a sixty-year-old Russian on a bicycle.

The post “Innocent Holy Foolishness”: How Leo Tolstoy Dealt with Grief by Cycling appeared first on Tolstoy Therapy.