KATE MARTIN
BOOKS TO LIVE BY●Mariella Frostrup
Unlucky in love? These reads
can fix a broken heart
WRITE TO
MARIELLA
Got a dilemma?
Email mariella@
sunday-times.
co.uk. Anonymity
on requestQ
I feel completely broken by my most recent
relationship. We were together for only six
months but it felt like everything I had been
waiting for. He ended it out of the blue and
without a reason. I am in my mid-twenties and
I have been heartbroken before, but I feel totally
lost this time around. It has been months but I don’t
feel like it’s getting any easier. What should I read
to help me get on with it and get over it?A
Thanks for the flashback to my twenties and the
reminder that there truly are benefits to maturing.
When people look at me sympathetically as the
decades accrue and ask which era of my youth
I’d most like to revisit, it raises eyebrows when I say
my forties. Really, spare me the angst of my twenties
— the turmoil of unrequited love, of ghosting (before
that term existed), of longing and despair, of partners
inexplicably rejecting you in ways that help to confirm
the insecurities you are riddled with.
I’m not sure why the loss of this past relationshiphas hit you so hard, but I do know there will be another
and probably a few more after that before you find
someone with whom the rhythm of life works better.
That’s why learning not to take rejection personally and
allowing yourself time to mourn is so important. There’s
heartache in almost every story ever written because
I’m afraid life is riddled with it, so mine will be a very
short list from a very long list of titles.
In times of emotional hardship back in the day, my
go-to was Isabel Allende’s magical-realist South America
— that was my twentysomething Narnia. The exiled
Chilean author is a sage of the human heart whose
oeuvre is driven by the vagaries of love and passion. So
if you want to disappear down a book-based rabbit hole,
start with The House of the Spirits and move through her
canon. She has sold more than 75 million books, so you
know you’re on to a winner, and she has form in the area
of romance, divorcing her second husband in her early
seventies and remarrying a couple of years later
because she accidentally fell in love with a man who’d
been writing to her ... by letter! So 19th century ■Heartburn
Nora Ephron
Virago, £9.99
From the writer who defined
the love challenges of a
generation comes a break-up
story that will have you
laughing out loud and
energised for the future.
It’s based on Ephron’s own
experience of being dumped
while pregnant with her first
child, and her acerbic wit and
determination to bounce back
is a fabulous ride towards a
most excellent destination.Instead of a Letter
Diana Athill
Granta, £8.99
Here Athill describes how as
a young woman she became
engaged to a dashing Royal
Air Force pilot she had met
aged 15. They corresponded
profusely while he was
stationed abroad but he
stopped writing and, two years
later, sent a brief, brutal
request for release from the
engagement to marry another
— leaving Athill to try to piece
her life back together.Siddhartha
Herman Hesse
Penguin Classics, £9.99
This classic novel might be a
surprise tonic for your broken
heart. It follows the journey
of a young man searching for
spiritual enlightenment in
ancient India. It’s beautifully
described and offers profound
insights into the question of
what truly makes us happy,
and what we can and can’t live
without. Perfect timing if
there’s emotional baggage
you want to shed.Villette
Charlotte Brontë
Wordsworth Editions, £2.99
Plain and seemingly passive
Lucy Snowe discovers her own
power after being forced to
move far from home and work
as a teacher. Pitted against
adversity, she learns to relish
independence. Widely
regarded as Brontë’s best
novel, it became a blueprint
for many other books where
a heroine discovers that
freedom is far more valuable
than an imperfect partner.The Sunday Times Magazine • 77