Green Tree couples up with 'queen of breakups' Rosie Wilby

Green Tree, Bloomsbury's health and wellbeing imprint, will publish Rosie Wilby's The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak.

Commissioning editor Matt Lowing acquired world all language rights, including e-book and audio English language rights, from Cathryn Summerhayes at Curtis Brown. 

In 2011, comedian Wilby was dumped by email and left with an "obsession" with breakups. She "embarked on a quest to investigate, understand and conquer the psychology of heartbreak" which resulted in her podcast "The Breakup Monologues". 

Part-memoir, part-investigation, The Breakup Monologues will take on questions about breakups in the modern age of 'ghosting', 'breadcrumbing' and 'conscious uncoupling'. Wilby will participate in a ‘sex lab’ at the University of Essex and put her own relationship under the microscope in order to find out if she has finally found ‘the one’.

The book will bring together everything she has learned from her own life and from her podcast guests, friends, fans, relationship therapists, scientists and sociologists. The book includes anecdotes and insights from Richard Herring, Dolly Alderton, Sofie Hagen and Ayesha Hazarika amongst others celebrity names.

Lowing said: "BBC Radio 4 recently described Rosie as the ‘queen of breakups’ and we are delighted to welcome this fantastically talented author and comedian to the Green Tree list. The Breakup Monologues is brilliant mix of insight, anecdote and memoir. Rich in reflection and authority, it is for anyone who has suffered the pains of heartbreak—so, in fact, every single one of us."

Wilby commented: "In my mid-40s, I realised I’d had a relatively high number of serious breakups. If I’d been legally able to get married, I’d already be onto my fifth ‘wife’. That puts me on multi-marriage par with Joan Collins. Yet it was in the fleeting gaps between relationships that I really got shit done.

"So I launched my podcast 'The Breakup Monologues' in order to investigate whether, behind the heartbreak and chaos, there might be some positive side effects to a separation... and, even more importantly, whether we can harness those side effects and continue to do that much active learning and personal growth when we choose to stay in a relationship. I’m delighted to work with Green Tree and Bloomsbury on expressing and further exploring those ideas in book form."

The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak will be published on 27th May 2021.