A manual for heartache
Cathy Rentzenbrink’s follow-up to her bestselling ‘The Last Act of Love’ is a guide to dealing with heartache. She talks to Bryony Gordon
After Cathy Rentzenbrink’s first book was published two years ago, “I became so bonkers that I had to go back to therapy.” We are sitting outside a café on the river near her home in west London, drinking coffee and discussing all the ways in which life has changed since she became a bestselling author – not the material ones that people presume come with the trappings of literary success, but the emotional ones.
The former Waterstones bookseller didn’t expect The Last Act of Love to do well, and nor was that the motivation behind it. It was a memoir about the life and death of her brother Matty, and Rentzenbrink had written it to make sense of the accident that would leave her beloved sibling in a persistent vegetative state (“ugly words for an ugly condition”) until the family applied to the courts for permission to withdraw all nutrition, finally allowing him to die just under a decade later.
Matty was just 16 when he was hit by a car near their home in Yorkshire in 1990; Cathy was 17, and from that moment on would only ever know her brother in a coma. The experience left her quietly traumatised; she hid her deep depression behind a facade of drinking and being the life and soul of the party.
In her new book, A Manual for Heartache, she explains that it was only while writing The Last Act of Love that the family learned to accept what had happened to them, finally scattering his ashes at sea. For years, Rentzenbrink, now 44, had driven herself mad questioning whether or not this had already happened.
“Matty died in 1998 and there was a big funeral,” she writes. “But, as far as I remembered, we were never able to face the final stage of picking up his ashes from the undertaker. I fretted about this over the years… what if there had been some kind of ceremony that I’d blotted out because I’d been so mad and drunk?”
While The Last Act of Love was a memoir, A Manual for Heartache comes under the genre of self-help. Not the grand sweeping “I can change your life” style of self-help that has come to be so mocked, but a quieter, calmer, more reflective type. She gently gives advice on what to say to the heartbroken (“it is impossible that any action of a friend or relative could make a newly grenade-struck person feel better” she writes) and offers ways to express grief that don’t fall into the clichéd “five stages” school of thought (Denial; Anger; Bargaining; Depression; Acceptance).
In fact, she says, the anger she felt was towards people who tried to tell her about the five stages. “It was my intention to write something consoling,” she says now. “I nearly had a chapter called ‘We need to talk about self-help’ because sometimes, when I’ve been on [literary] panels at different events, I’ve felt less judged for admitting to depression than to reading self-help books. There’s a sense that you’ll start turning your nose up at me. And that’s a shame because why wouldn’t you want to look after yourself? Especially as we know that mental health provision is so tricky. At the very least it provides people with the ‘you’re not alone’ thing.
“This is just my survey of everything out there [about heartache] that is useful. Marcus Aurelius was writing self-help two millennia ago. That really comforts me – you realise that all the problems we are facing today have always been there.”
A Manual for Heartache was inspired by the huge response Rentzenbrink received to The Last Act of Love; she was overwhelmed by the number of people getting in touch to share their own experiences of grief. This was, she says, “beautiful and a massive honour, and because I have always worked in books, I also know how rare it is. It was a huge shock. I didn’t know how many people would talk back to me.”
She is clear that her second book is for anyone who has suffered through any sort of heartache, from death through to the break-up of a relationship. To Rentzenbrink, heartache is heartache, and all feelings and experiences are valid.
“I think of both books as a conversation opener. People want to add to the conversation. And now I’m adding to the conversation again – with lots of what I’ve learned about myself, but also what I have learned through what people have chatted to me about.
“I’m continually in awe of other people and how they deal with terrible things. I try to take all of that awe as a positive thing as opposed to being bowed down by all the suffering of humanity.”
But the intensity of this relationship with her readers did take its toll. During a holiday, which she took to unwind in the wake of the success of The Last Act of Love, Rentzenbrink “drank for eight days” and ended up in the depths of depression again.
“I know now that that isn’t a good idea. If I had a tender ankle I wouldn’t go skydiving, and I know that drinking eight days in a row isn’t going to help. I’ve got to a point now in therapy where I’ve stopped hating myself for being alive when my brother isn’t. But if you’re in a place of self-loathing, who cares if you’re drinking for eight days in a row? Because you feel so s--- in the first place. I think the big thing that has clunked into place since the release of The Lact Act of Love is that I know I deserve to feel OK.”
There’s a sense that it has been healing. “It’s astonishing what happens when you put honesty into the world,” she says. “I’d spent a long time trying to be this facsimile of me, this hologrammatic party girl. And then I was honest and…” She stops for a moment. “To me that’s the transformational thing, to feel I can be real and people will still like me.” She looks momentarily amazed. “People seem to like the real me!”
Her father is Irish, her mother English, “and I only realised about three weeks ago that it’s my Irish self that has written this book. That’s written both books, and my English
‘Sometimes I have felt less judged for admitting to depression than to reading self-help books’
‘The big thing that’s clunked into place since the release of The Last Act of Love is that I know I deserve to feel OK’
self is profoundly embarrassed.” She laughs. “My dad, he will cry in front of anybody and not give a f---. While my English side is saying, ‘What have you done? Keep your head down, don’t look like a complete fruitcake’.”
In the end though, Rentzenbrink makes being a fruitcake look, if not easy, then at the very least normal. She somehow makes it feel comforting; she reassures you that not feeling OK is absolutely OK.
“I tried to write the things I’d like to have been told. My 17-year-old self is strong in the book. When you feel sad or depressed you want to talk to yourself like a child you are fond of.”
She has learned to pare things back. “I think the temptation is to believe we are complicated. But everything is quite simple. We want to love and be loved. We want to feel there is purpose. All you have to do is have hope. Even if emotionally you don’t feel it, intellectually you need to try to know it. Just try to get your brain to send you that message. If I can hold on to some sort of sense that things are going to improve…”
She looks up from her coffee and smiles with her eyes. “It’s not going to be like this tomorrow. It won’t be like this all the time.”