How 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields helped me through heartbreak, one emotional sucker punch at a time

• Anybody whose partner of 10 years walks out without warning is likely to feel a bewildering rattle bag of emotions. If that partner leaves you alone in a relatively new town, with 24/7 care of two small children shortly to be diagnosed with ADHD and autism, those emotions can scatter and collide like marbles in a locked room. Anger crashes into despair and confusion with weird giddy rolls of euphoria and glassy moments of deadened inertia.When this happened to me, in September 2013, I turned to an extraordinary album that helped reflect and dissect the whole experience. Released in 1999, 69 Love Songs is a brilliant, sprawling, three-part record by The Magnetic Fields, the lo-fi indie collective formed in 1989 by Boston-born, New York-based songwriter Stephin Merritt with a revolving cast of male and female vocalists (plus author Lemony Snicket on accordion). Early albums included tributes to Phil Spector, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Cole Porter. Pop snobs loved the layers of reference: the songs were always about songs.