Valentine’s Day is my favorite holiday! It’s always felt like the one day a year that being a romantic is properly celebrated and encouraged. So naturally, I’m obsessed.
For me, love has looked different this year, and originally, I wasn’t as pumped for V-day. Learning that love can be more than just the romantic kind seems like an obvious lesson, but heartbreak is challenging and isolating.
Where would I have been this year, without the best therapist I could ask for: my books! My gift for Valentine’s Day is to share some of the best advice I’ve ever received; you just have to go and read these books.
“Everything I Know About Love” by Dolly Alderton
We’ll start with a classic. I first read Alderton’s “Everything I Know About Love” during my junior year of high school. I was a mess then, dealing with my first “serious situationship.” Rejection felt world-ending at 16. Enter Alderton. Her memoir follows her upbringing in England, from boarding school to the romantic dramas and defining friendships of her twenties, ultimately reframing the meaning of love.
She described growing up and being a teenager in a painfully authentic way. She never held back from embracing her awkwardness or sharing stories she’d probably rather forget. This book was the first time I read a memoir that felt real and wasn’t just spitting out information and lessons at me.
Alderton wasn’t telling me about her life; I was experiencing it alongside her. Through the pages of this book, I regained confidence and found myself in her words. When I’ve turned to reread it, I finish with a renewed appreciation for what really matters: family and the girls who’ve become family. “Everything I Know About Love” is the perfect coming-of-age story.
“Heart the Lover” by Lily King
Featured in The New York Times’ “100 Notable Books of 2025,” “Heart the Lover” stumbled into my lap over winter break. While I was hesitant to include a fiction book in this list, I read it over the span of three sittings, invigorated with the college environment and characters King built.
“Heart the Lover” depicts a love triangle that forms in three students’ senior year of college, and the impact these few months have on the rest of their lives. To flash from college to the protagonist’s life decades later, married to a completely different man with kids of her own, is gut-wrenching. Yet, it also becomes incredibly fulfilling by the end.
These teen flings profoundly carry weight, as it’s clear the characters hold onto their university experiences. However, this doesn’t stop the leading trio from building their own adult lives, which was healing. The emotion was equally genuine from the twenties to the forties, and it was a beautiful reminder that there is so much life left for us to live.
“Notes On Heartbreak” by Annie Lord
I’ve saved the best for last, as no book touched me last year quite like “Notes On Heartbreak.” The debut novel of Vogue relationship columnist Annie Lord, “Notes On Heartbreak,” begins with the breakup of a long-term relationship, and the following 400 pages detail the painstaking process of the author learning to get over it.
The reader is strapped in for the bumpy ride, experiencing, along with Lord, the non-linear process of attempting to stop loving an ex. It felt like Lord was reading my mind. It was devastating yet hilarious at times, and along the way, Lord learns so much about herself that has nothing to do with her past relationship.
There is no fairytale ending with a new prince to sweep Lord off her feet. Instead, her perspective on love shifted, and so did mine. It’s laughing myself to sleep every night with my roommate, my sisters calling me for debriefs and morning coffee with my friends.
While this book can’t address one’s romantic tribulations directly, it comes awfully close. I think everyone can take away something valuable from reading it. Lord can’t heal the wound, but her words serve as a Band-Aid and reminder that you’re never alone.
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