Book of the Year 2020: 'Out of Love' by Hazel Hayes

Sometimes my favourite book of the year is one that had the best story. Or maybe its one that displayed the most engaging writing. Or perhaps it will have introduced me to a new writer I know I’m going to love. 

In 2020, it’s a book that was exactly what I needed at exactly the time I read it: Hazel Hayes’ Out of Love. 

Let me put it like this: Before I read this book I was finding it next to impossible to pick up a book. I could read, but it meant literally forcing myself to pick something up, and a conscious effort to go from one word to the next. I hadn’t even attempted to write anything in months. The idea of coming up with something creative was alien to me. 

But when I picked up Out of Love, I just slipped into it and kept falling. For the first time in months, the reading took no effort. The words were comforting, familiar, while still being new and stimulating. Each time I finished reading, I’d pick up my notebook and starting writing blog posts again. And then, once I was done, picking up the next book, and carrying on writing, felt natural again. 

This year has been, to put it mildly, a little bit shit. 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 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. 

What Out of Love did for me was help me process all those feeling, just as I needed it. 

One of the tips you’ll find in How-To-Write books is when proof-reading to read your manuscript backwards. This way you break the flow, looking at things backwards in a way that allows you see your story from a different angle. All the actions and reactions are reversed, and you find your brain no longer throws up the same assumptions. 

By telling her story in reverse, Hayes highlights parts of a doomed love story we don’t normally see. Girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, girl and boy grow apart, girl and boy break up, this an uninteresting story we’ve seen a thousand times. But by reading it backwards, our focus falls on other elements. Instead of predicting where the story is going, and guessing whether or not the two lovebirds will make it work, we see something different. 

We see that as miserable as she is as the ending of her relationship, she has left it a far more evolved, grown up, mature woman. 

Things end. But somethings that thing was made to have an ending. And a thing ending doesn’t mean the thing had no value. 

It doesn’t hurt that I loved her writing style. Lyrical, with a touch of the poetic, but not enough to risk feeling pretentious. You never feel Hayes believes the words she uses are more important than the story she’s using them to tell. 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. There is clearly an autobiographic element to this story, and you can tell that Hayes has spent a lot of time think about how to describe the emotions her protagonist portrays. 

I wouldn’t go as far as to say this is the greatest story ever written. But that’s not just what a Book of the Year is about. What it was was exactly the story I needed to read, told in the way I needed to read it, at the time I needed to read it. 

Has anyone else had a book effect them like this? What were the stories that helped you break through the fog? 

What were your books of the year for 2020? Let me know the places you went to escape the year. It’s time to repopulate my To-Read list.