Heartsick Three Stories about Love and Loss, and What Happens in Between

Heartsick is Jessie Stephens's debut work of narrative nonfiction, tracing three real people through the long, disorienting aftermath of heartbreak. Reported and shaped with a novelist's eye, it follows their stories closely enough to make one of the most universal human experiences feel newly specific.

Claire has come home from London to her dusty Australian hometown, only to sense that something has gone wrong in her relationship with her partner Maggie. Patrick, a lonely university student, is pulled into orbit around a classmate named Caitlin and cannot tell whether she feels the same. Ana is contentedly married with three children — until one night she falls unexpectedly in love with someone else.

Weaving the three accounts together, Stephens captures both the agony and the occasional strange grace of a broken heart, arguing that emotional pain can remake us even as it undoes us. Shortlisted for the ABIA General Non-Fiction Book of the Year, Heartsick is a tender, precise, and deeply empathetic look at how loving and losing changes a life.