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Family & Relationships Love & Romance

Heartbroken

Field Notes on a Constant Condition

by (author) Laura Pratt

Publisher
Random House of Canada
Initial publish date
Jan 2023
Category
Love & Romance, Grief & Loss, Emotions
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781039005761
    Publish Date
    Jan 2023
    List Price
    $24.95

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Where to buy it

Description

Imbued with longing, erudition and hard-earned wisdom, Heartbroken dares to delve into a universal ordeal—perhaps the one that makes us the most human of all.

When Laura Pratt’s long-distance partner of six years tells her “it’s over” at a busy downtown train station, she is sent reeling, the breakup coming out of the blue. He, meanwhile, closes himself off, refusing to acknowledge Laura and her requests for explanation.

In the following days, months and then years, Laura struggles to make sense of this sudden ending, alone and filled with questions. A journalist, she seeks to understand the freefall that is heartbreak and how so many before her survived it, drawing on forces across time and form, and uncovers literary, philosophical, scientific and psychological accounts of the mysterious alchemy of how we human beings fall in love in the first place, and why, when it ends, some of us take longer to get over it, or never do. She weaves this background of cultural history with her own bracing story of passionate love and its loss, and offers some hope for arriving—changed, broadened, grateful—on the other side.

About the author

Contributor Notes

LAURA PRATT is a long-time journalist, writer and editor. She writes for Canadian magazines and edits books. Her first memoir, The Fleeting Years, was published in 2004. She lives in Toronto with whichever of her kids and dogs she can corral to join her. She’s a 2020 graduate of the University of King’s College’s creative nonfiction MFA. She won an honourable mention in Prairie Fire’s 2020 CNF contest and was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s 2019 CNF contest. She has served as a judge at the National Magazine Awards for several years.

Excerpt: Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition (by (author) Laura Pratt)

“It’s over,” he said, and pitched himself out of the car, even though I’d barely come to a stop outside Union Station. I can’t imagine he kissed me. But I can’t imagine he didn’t. He always kissed me. And then he was gone like he meant it, tearing across Front Street, all rage and long limbs.

In eight minutes, his train to Montreal would lurch away from the platform and my world would cleave into two. Unless I could hold it together.

I swung the minivan around a corner into an underground parking lot across from the train station. It was midday on a Toronto Tuesday and the place was packed. Seven minutes and not a spot in sight. I abandoned the vehicle at a crazy angle and ran up the ramp without breathing and into the January sunlight and across the road and through the heavy doors. The ticket lobby was vast and limestone-slick, glinting bronze under light pouring in from the Roman bath windows at either end of its hundred-foot vaulted ceiling. It was enor­mous and swimming with souls, each trailing their own carry-ons and crises.

We were there too, imprinted from the hundreds of pas­sages we’d made to each other’s cities for all those ecstatic biweekly sojourns, the legacy of our pyrotechnic chemistry still messing with the lights. For six years I’d occupied this space in a state of anticipation and joy; now it was the opposite.

He had a two-minute lead on me. The possibility that I might’ve lost him already prickled my synapses, but I snuffed it out. I tore through the Great Hall, skating along its Tennessee marble toward the wide staircase that led down to the trains. He was at the bottom, his duffle bag across his taut shoulders, his posture concrete. I called out to him. He turned. His eyes were mean. Reflected in them, I could see the email he’d found that morning on my computer, a too-effusive note of gratitude to a former male colleague for bolstering me during a rough patch that had sparked his jealousy.

My eyes overflowed as I careened down the stairs, panting and saying, “I’m sorry!” again and again. He just looked at me, his winter coat rising and falling with his breath. I began to cry. People’s heads jerked up and they stole glimpses of us. We were a developing scene beside the ticket counter.

He didn’t budge. My stomach clenched in disbelief. He had flown, so I would fight. I would shame him with my drama, a public display that insisted on compassion. But his wrist was steel when I touched it.

How I had loved that skin. I remembered the first moment I caught sight of it, a tease through his open collar as he approached in a hotel parking lot at our very start. I remem­bered thinking: I can’t wait to be with that. Now there were five minutes left, tops.

He turned and hustled down the next set of stairs to the sub-basement, a holding pen for passengers organized accord­ing to their destinations. I followed, sobbing, to the queue for his train, which ended outside the women’s washroom. “Don’t go!” My ragged horribleness, all snot and misery, was a shame. The people around us— checking their phones, living their lives— adjusted their energy to accommodate ours. There wasn’t a soul in that cavernous underground cell who wasn’t tuned in to our performance. We were a farce.

He looked at me, his eyes narrowed. “No more,” he said in a voice conscious of all that humanity. “I’m done.” I knew that tone. Sam could accelerate rapidly and we’d sped before. But now he was on fire. Something about this time was making the roots of my hair ache.
Trains rumbled above.

I pushed in to fill up all the space beside him. I pleaded with him with my voice and my eyes. I said, “I’m so sorry!” in great, heaving gulps. But I meant: Save me. I am slipping under the waves. You are my life raft. Do not let me sink to the bottom of the ocean. My hair was plastered to my face with my tears; he stepped away from my pull. “Please don’t go!” I said. All the eyes in that sub-basement flicked to me. The curious, the entertained, the sorry.

“I am leaving now and this is goodbye,” he hissed. He was beautiful, his features at their peak in his rage. Ironically, his smile lines were their most pronounced when he was pissed.

“Will this be the last time I see you?” I asked. It was a tectonic question. A final slam against his resistance. Having to say so out loud would shock him. Surely.

He told me, “Yes. It will be the last time you see me.”

He used to give me the scuba-diving signal we’d learned in Cuba that lets your partner know you’re watching out for them. See me? he would indicate across prickly public spaces. I’ve got you. His gaze now was vacant. He’d withdrawn his investment.

The crowd leaned in for my response to his terrible decla­ration and I did not disappoint. I reached for his face and wept, never not looking at him. And then I paused a shuddering moment in that cold, final place and took him in. Just in case.

That he allowed all this theatre terrified me. I felt, inside that drama, inside that station, worse than I had ever felt. How could he be leaving? How could we be ending? How could one person lose an entire other person, a person who was so essen­tial? The vastness of the questions floored me, flattened me to the tiles outside the women’s washroom.

Boarding began, and the underground procession whose ranks included a furious man who was a container of all our life together, all the moments that were ours alone, readied to board a train. Two minutes.

“Please,” I wailed. But the line’s momentum pulled him with it and he was swept up in the rolling luggage. “Don’t go!” I choked from beside the women’s washroom, from the sad­dest patch of the black universe. But he did.

And so I sank down down, into the waves, no longer attached to him or anything. I could be swept into terrifying anywhere now that nothing secured me to this earthly plane. I was at everything’s mercy, churning away from what gave me my shape. I was unmoored.

I don’t remember if he looked back. But I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have. He always looked back.

This was where heartbreak began.

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR HEARTBROKEN:
“Pratt candidly takes us through the throes of heartbreak.... Her language is raw and emotional, her journey entirely relatable. She tempers this emotion with a journalistic approach to dealing with heartbreak, including data, quotes, studies and cultural references about love, loss, grief and moving on. I’m sure many of us can see ourselves in Pratt when we too were at the lowest of our low following a split.” —The Toronto Star
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HEARTBROKEN:

“With lyrical prose and startling honesty, Laura Pratt writes about a familiar condition. Who among us has not been heartbroken? But despite the common thread running through this memoir, I’ve never read anything like it. There is such rare beauty in the candid generosity of Pratt’s words as she invites us to indulge our broken hearts, then take the pieces and build something new with the knowledge she has shared. Many will feel seen and comforted by this beautiful work of emotional art.” —Marissa Stapley, New York Times bestselling author of Lucky

“Laura Pratt is a marvelous writer. If you’re reeling from a fresh heartbreak—or still mystified by the impact of ancient one—Heartbroken will help you heal it. This is an astonishingly generous and profoundly intelligent book filled with arresting insights. It lets you in on the author’s own exquisite heartache and reckoning with it, while allowing you to more deeply understand your own relationship with loves lost. I devoured it.” —Haley McGee, author of The Ex-Boyfriend Yard Sale

Beautifully lyrical, astonishingly honest and sparkling with humour and insight, Heartbroken changed the way I think about love and loss. In it, Laura Pratt gathers poets, philosophers, songwriters and scientists across the ages to help her explore and map the heart’s deepest valleys. It is an achingly generous, riveting tale filled with solace and grace.”
Kim Pittaway, co-author of Toufah: The Woman Who Inspired an African #MeToo Movement

With passion, courage and curiosity, Laura Pratt plunges into the deepest waters of loss and brings back a gift for all lovelorn readers who are plain fed up with being urged to buck up and move on. This book tells the truth: not everyone can.”
Rona Maynard, author of Starter Dog: My Path to Joy, Belonging and Loving This World

“Most of us have suffered a heartbreak, however temporary. But Laura Pratt is unique in my experience—not just for the length and depth of her heartbreak but for her brilliant, close observation of a sorrow that would not go away. Threaded with joyful memories of sex, drugs and rock and roll, Heartbroken is also an anthology of poets, philosophers, scientists and therapists who have mused on unrequited love. I can’t imagine a better guide over this rough terrain than Pratt—curious, open-minded, unflinchingly honest and touchingly eloquent.” —Katherine Ashenburg, author of Her Turn and The Mourner’s Dance

“Laura Pratt is fearless with her mesmerizing account of aching vulnerability. Her commitment to honesty and authenticity is mind-blowing, and her generosity with sharing such a harrowing take on love is unparalleled. Her heart will mean the world to readers.” —Anne T. Donahue, author of Nobody Cares

Make no mistake, Pratt, like Elizabeth Smart, will break your heart with her raw-to-the-bone confessional. But this writing is ‘smart’ in another way, teasing out the literary history, psychology, and physiology of heartbreak, and the lessons learned from her chosen ‘high frequency life.’” —Harry Thurston, author of Lost River: The Waters of Remembrance