Moving On

Getting Past Your Breakup

Susan J. Elliott · 2009

Elliott’s practical, no-nonsense guide to recovering from the end of a relationship — whether romantic, platonic, or professional — treats moving on as a skill that can be learned rather than a feeling that simply arrives when you are ready. For anyone stuck in the loop of checking their ex’s social media at midnight, she is direct, warm, and genuinely useful.

Start Where You Are

Pema Chödrön · 1994

Chödrön’s Buddhist approach to working with difficult emotions — including the grief and resistance of not-yet-having-moved-on — is one of the most compassionate and counter-intuitive available. Her central instruction is always the same: start exactly where you are, with whatever is actually here, not where you think you should be.

The Wisdom of a Broken Heart

Susan Piver · 2010

Piver, a Buddhist teacher and writer, approaches heartbreak not as a problem to be solved but as an experience to be entered fully — arguing that the willingness to feel the loss completely is actually the fastest route through it. For anyone who has been trying to outrun their grief and finding it keeps catching up, Piver offers a different strategy: stop running, turn around, and look.

Transitions

William Bridges · 1980

Bridges’s model of change — the ending, the neutral zone, and the new beginning — is the most useful framework available for understanding why moving on is not a single moment but a process with distinct phases, each requiring something different. For anyone frustrated that they are not “over it” yet, Bridges explains exactly where in the process they are, and why it feels the way it does.

Less

Andrew Sean Greer · 2017

Rather than attend his ex-boyfriend’s wedding, Arthur Less accepts every half-baked literary invitation he’s ever received and circles the globe instead, fleeing in a way that gradually, almost by accident, starts to look like moving forward. This Pulitzer winner is genuinely funny about the undignified, roundabout route moving on usually takes.

Britt-Marie Was Here

Fredrik Backman · 2014

After her marriage ends, Britt-Marie takes the only job she can find in a town she’s never heard of, and rebuilds a life there one small, stubborn act of usefulness at a time. Backman is tender about how undramatic moving on actually looks from the inside — less a leap, more a long series of unglamorous Tuesdays.