Heartsick
Three Stories about Love, Pain, and What Happens in Between
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Heartsick unpacks the destruction of love by following the true stories of three lives altered by a major heartbreak.
I wrote this book for the person who doesn’t want to be told that this too shall pass. Not yet. Who wants to sit with it. And see it for what it is. Who wants to know they’re not alone. That their pain is at once unique and universal. Belonging to them and everyone.
When we’re thrown into the chaos of heartsickness, we focus so much on the end. The fact we are now unloved seems so much more important than the reality that we once were.
This book was born in the hours I’ve waited for men to message me back and who never did…
In the years full of almost-relationships, I thought, “I cannot handle another rejection,” and then found myself turned down by someone I wasn’t even sure I liked. I wrote this book because I know what it is to feel fundamentally unlovable. I knew when I was looking for Ana, Patrick, and Claire that their stories had to be true, because within them would be nuances I’d never noticed before and realities I couldn’t have invented. I didn’t want to be limited by what I happened to know about love and loss. I wanted to learn from people as I wrote, injecting wisdom from different places and genders and ages into this book.
Weaving together these three true stories, Jessie Stephens captures the painful but wholeheartedly universal experience of heartbreak. Deeply relatable, addictive to the very last page, and powerfully human, Heartsick reminds us that emotional pain can make us as it breaks us and that storytelling has the ultimate healing power.
In the solitude that reading a book demands, one is forced to reflect on one’s own life. After all, every time we explore others, we’re mostly just exploring ourselves.
These are their stories—Ana’s and Patrick’s and Claire’s. But it is also my story and our story. I trust within it you will find echoes of yourself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian writer Stephens parses the "unique and universal" effects of heartbreak in this candid debut. Having experienced the "unholy blend of grief and self-loathing" that, she writes, often follows breakups, Stephens set out to construct a book that "didn't explain away heartbreak," but rather delved into its complexities. She effectively does this by telling the real-life breakup stories of three individuals: 30-ish Claire, who, after moving from London to Australia, met and married her personal trainer, Maggie, despite a friend's caution not to; Ana, a mother of three, who began an affair with her husband's best friend after 25 years of marriage; and 20-something college student Patrick, who fell in love with a girl he couldn't have, until she broke up with her boyfriend for him. As Stephens unspools their stories, each of which succumbs to a slow ruin brought on by doubt and insecurities, she renders in affecting scenes the tidal shifts of emotion—the sickness, the bottomless despair, the acts of self-destruction—that accompany the demise of love. Despite the book's melancholic nature, there's beauty in her subjects' vulnerability and resilience. As Stephens writes, "It is only through sharing... the most tormented parts of ourselves that we're able to discover how much we have in common." A paean to the lovelorn, this stuns in its rawness.