A book to help you mend your broken heart

In September last year, a day before her birthday, Milan Vohra, India’s first Mills & Boon author, had an unfortunate experience. “I was trekking in Bhutan and had a retina detachment so in the space of some two or three hours, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, I went blind in one eye,” says the Bengaluru-based writer and advertising professional.
She recalls the darkness that descended on her, “all I could see were the shoes of the person in front of me…one sliver at the bottom,” says Milan, who rushed to Delhi for an emergency surgery, which was followed by three more within months.
The incident, she says, was a wakeup call. “It made me realise that everything is fragile. I had been downplaying the importance of what writing meant to me because I was quite pressed for time and energy, especially as a caregiver and working at a demanding job.”
Lying in the hospital, still struggling to see properly, however, made her reexamine her life and priorities. “I asked myself this question: if I had six months left, what am I going to regret the most?” Not finishing the books, which were important to Milan was top of the list. “They are quite clear in my head. I had to stop procrastinating and buckle down to doing it. After all, nobody else can write your book.”
The incident catalysed her decision to go ahead and write Heartbreak Unfiltered: Things nobody told you about love, loss and letting go (Rupa Publications), a genre-defying collection of stories of heartbreak suffered by real people, interspersed with research, personal anecdotes and mental exercises to help broken-hearted readers come to terms with their loss.
In the thick of all her surgeries, Milan, who had been researching for and thinking about this book for nearly a decade, ended up meeting Dibakar Ghosh, Editorial Director at Rupa Publications. “He got the book right away...connected to it on a heart level and also understood how pressing the need for this book was.”
By the time she actually started putting the book together, Milan had already collected many of the stories that would be part of this book. “Having written romances for years, I find that people easily confide in me about their lives. I listen well, share too from my life, care deeply and remember details.”
For instance, one of the stories titled ‘Hugs for Free: Arun’s story’ emerged out of a chance encounter with a young man in Bengaluru’s Central Business District, back in 2020. “I was walking down the street to my cafe when I saw this person standing there with a board that said, ‘Feeling sad. Need a hug. Come and hug me’.” She promptly did and then stayed a while, watching him hug other people as well. “It wasn’t just a hug in isolation. It was almost as if he was asking people to open up and talk if they felt like it.”
They went on to exchange numbers and Milan set up a meeting with this young man. It was pouring the day of the meeting, she remembers, and she was worried that he would cancel, but, “he made it, soaked, with an umbrella in his hand, and we had the longest conversation,” says Milan, who changed names and details to protect the identities of those featured.
The initial plan of the book was to have a series of stories about heartbreak, taken from people across gender identities, cultures, age groups, sexual orientations and class divides, says Milan. “I thought that the stories just spoke for themselves, without me needing to add anything. They make you reflect on your own relationships because you can sometimes spot parallels between what was happening in the story and what could have been happening with you.”
However, she kept getting feedback that while the stories were powerful, a reader would need more, so the structure of the book changed.“For instance, understanding attachment styles or the push-pull dynamic is not something a person can take away from a story alone,” says Milan, who added the chapters and exercises to the book to help readers find understanding and work through the heartbreak, something nearly everyone in the world goes through at some point in their lives. ”I hope after reading this book, they will come away inspired to use their heartbreak as an act of resistance to create something bigger than the pain.”
The years spent in advertising, she says, also helped her develop the book. “When I have to crack an advertising brief with too much information and little direction, I distance myself from the information overload and hover over the problem. I tell myself to take a helicopter view of things. I wanted people to look at their relationships, too, with this helicopter view,” says Milan, who has been writing fiction, in addition to copywriting, for many years now.