They blend, allowing us to feel the sense of the protagonist’s own thoughts and uncertainties as they navigate their way through a relationship they are never certain about. You never feel Hayes believes the words she uses are more important than the story she’s using them to tell. Lyrical, with a touch of the poetic, but not enough to risk feeling pretentious. It doesn’t hurt that I loved her writing style. And a thing ending doesn’t mean the thing had no value. But somethings that thing was made to have an ending. All the actions and reactions are reversed, and you find your brain no longer throws up the same assumptions. This way you break the flow, looking at things backwards in a way that allows you see your story from a different angle. One of the tips you’ll find in How-To-Write books is when proof-reading to read your manuscript backwards. What Out of Love did for me was help me process all those feeling, just as I needed it. This has required a lot of processing, dealing with the concept of such a huge part of my life being over, and the future I thought before me no longer there. Part of this has involved the end of my marriage a relationship that lasted 15 years that encompassed almost the whole of my adult life. This year has been, to put it mildly, a little bit shit. And then, once I was done, picking up the next book, and carrying on writing, felt natural again. Each time I finished reading, I’d pick up my notebook and starting writing blog posts again. The words were comforting, familiar, while still being new and stimulating.

For the first time in months, the reading took no effort. But when I picked up Out of Love, I just slipped into it and kept falling.

Hazel hayes books