'The one that just destroyed me': B.C. author recounts painful breakup in new memoir

It wasn't her first breakup. In fact, she had been divorced before.

But it was the one that shook her to her core.

"For some reason just this one, this guy, this one love, it was just the one that just destroyed me," Roo Phelps told Daybreak South host Chris Walker.

The journal from her most recent breakup is now a 380-page book.

Released in December, it chronicles the 11 weeks following her June 2018 breakup. And though it's only been available for six weeks, it's already made Amazon.ca's Top 100 bestseller list for books about breakups and divorce.

When Phelps and her boyfriend split last summer, she said it was the most painful breakup she had ever encountered.

"I had essentially given up hope of ever connecting or feeling that way about somebody ever again after my marriage had ended," she said. "It was a really hard place to get to, and when that didn't work out, it was just devastating."

She instantly took to journaling as a way of working through what happened.

"It started as a journal of just what was happening with the breakup and then it kind of became an all-out examination of every relationship in my life, my friendships, my family," she said.

Phelps thought about her previous marriage, why that had ended, the loss of her best friend nearly a decade ago and her own trauma from an elevator accident.

"The book essentially just became this deep digging into why am I where I am and how has this all happened and what does this all mean."

While trying to learn more about how to handle her situation, Phelps came across some information that she would focus on throughout the next few weeks: she found that, according to a group of psychologists, it takes the average person 11 weeks to mend a broken heart.

While she said that, from her experience, this isn't true at all, it helped her look forward.

"I think an arbitrary timeline was what I needed at the time to have some sort of hope that it would get better," she said.

Writing 11 Weeks: The Real-Time Chronicling of a Breakup has been cathartic for Phelps. She said the writing process helped her learn more about herself and going back and reading what her friends and family had said or done for her during difficult times created a new level of appreciation for her loved ones. 

"When you write about stuff, you are forced to really closely examine your own actions and the actions of people around you, so it made me really take stock of my own behaviour," she said. 

Phelps hopes her journey can help others feeling hopeless after a rough split.

"It's OK to be a mess and everybody has been there and everyone has had those horrible low moments and everyone has had that 'no one's going to love me again' type thing and that feeling and it's not true," she said.

"That's just the moment that you're in."