The Novel Celebrities Are Flocking To For Help When Love Dies And The Author Who Survived A Breakdown To Write It

In the world of celebrity stardom, followers are easy gained and relationships are impossible to hold onto. Celebrities are flocking to Daniel Chidiac’s The Modern Break-up to survive their break-ups. It’s a gripping fiction. But embedded in its story is a wealth of relationship (and its aftermath) advice to unpack. “The Modern Break-up” is “a novel full of truths about dating, separations, and love: direct, raw, and damn revealing.” And it’s becoming an influencer itself. @themodernbreakupbook has over 530,000 followers and growing.

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Daniel didn’t plan on being a novelist. He was studying commerce at uni until one guest speaker made him completely change course – unwittingly.

“I remember sitting in the lecture room with so many other students,” he recalls. “There was a guest speaker from price Waterhouse a Cooper speaking about his job and how he gets to fly all around the world. He was in his late 50s earning $175,000 a year at the time, about 15 years ago. I looked around and everyone was nodding their head with how amazing it was, and all I thought to myself was that I wanted to have a much greater impact and be making a lot more than that. I picked up my books in that moment and left. I had no idea what I wanted to do but knew I didn’t want to be there.”

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Daniel’s first attempts at making an impact didn’t go well. he ended up with a failed clothing business and a five-figure debt. He became a personal trainer to pay it off until his unhappiness surged and he crashed hard.

“I just wanted to be happy in every moment. I realised how much my thoughts had in shaping my life and I started feeling fulfilled. I started appreciating the little things. I started writing down what I was discovering within myself and I became addicted to writing. I would literally wake up at 3am when I had work the next day and would have to write because it was pouring out of me. I was never a writer, but I wanted to get these thoughts out.”

Those thoughts became the manuscript for Daniel’s first book and with that came another test of his resilience.

“Hardly anyone accepted my manuscript even though I was willing to pay them. One in particular said in the nicest possible way that she advised I didn’t see the book as being my sole income, and in fact didn’t think I’d make any money from it. She said she didn’t want to waste my time editing it,” he remembers. “I ran to the park near my house, ran until I was physically sick and then cried. But after the tears, something clicked in me. I knew I had found something special within myself that I wanted to share with the world.”

He restructured the book in seven days, found an editor and self-published. The book he called “Who Says You Can’t? You Do” became a hit. Then one day about two years after its release, he received an email from Penguin Random House in New York. In that same week, Hachette wanted to publish the book as well. He signed a six-figure deal. The book is now published in thirteen languages and was a best seller in eight countries. This gave him the courage to try for something more ambitious, a whole new genre of writing, a self-help book disguised in a fiction novel. “The Modern Break-up” was written, edited and published far more easily. It was an instant success.

“I think what makes it stand out is that it’s raw, real and relatable. When I set out to write the book, I promised myself I wouldn’t sugar coat anything. It’s also unique in that all the characters around Amelia, the book’s protagonist, give their opinions and reflect on their life as they observe what she is going through. We have all been those characters at stages of our life. We absorb those ideas as advice,” Daniel says.

The book is making $200,000 in some months and selling thousands of copies a week. It’s also a social media darling, being spread by celebrities who have read it and raved.

“Everyone in the industry still told me that it would be impossible to get onto shelves being independently published, and I wouldn’t get translation deals. I blocked that out as it’s a limitation and visualised the opposite. Now I have signed a direct deal with a major German publisher and I’ve just signed a Greek translation deal. I am also in talks with producers about turning the modern break up into a series or feature film,” Daniel adds.