A bit of Bridgerton and a John Grisham murder mystery novel. That’s the combination that could see Rory McIlroy finally come up with a winning formula in The Masters in his 17th appearance this week at Augusta National and attempt No 11 to become just the sixth player to complete a career grand slam in golf. In terms of his game, nothing could really have gone better for the Northern Irishman in the build up to the event's 89th edition, having won twice on the PGA Tour, including a second success in The Players Championship, already this year. He’s also feeling tickety boo health-wise, insisting that an elbow issue in his final competitive warm up round for the season’s opening major is no longer a problem after receiving treatment on it. Which leaves the mental aspect of the challenge he now faces in terms of trying to deal with what he calls “noise” around him in this particular tournament and, if his pre-event press conference was anything to go by, McIlroy seems very relaxed indeed on his latest trip up Magnolia Lane. Having revealed that he’d watched the film Devil Wears Prada on the Sunday night before his play-off win over J.J. Spaun in The Players Championship, the world No 2 was asked if he had any similar viewing planned for this week. “Yeah, I've gotten into Bridgerton,” he said, smiling, of the hit British historical romance series. “I was very against watching it, but (wife) Erica convinced me. So we're on a bit of a Bridgerton kick this week.” A bit later, having arrived ten minutes early for his scheduled 9.30am press conference but being perfectly happy to hang around a lot longer than he had in the same room 12 months earlier, McIlroy was asked what he was reading at the moment and revealed that, for the first time in a while, it was a novel. “I actually got some fiction into my life,” he said, smiling once more. “It's The Reckoning, a John Grisham book. It's got off to a pretty good start (laughing).” As he prepares for his Masters reckoning, McIlroy talked openly about how he is ready to go through “heartbreak” again in a quest to land a first major win since 2014, a series of near misses in the game’s marquee events continuing as he let a winning position slip from his grasp in last year’s US Open at Pinehurst. “At a certain point in someone's life, someone doesn't want to fall in love because they don't want to get their heart broken,” explained the 35-year-old. “Instinctually as human beings we hold back sometimes because of the fear of getting hurt, whether that's a conscious decision or subconscious decision, and I think I was doing that on the golf course a little bit for a few years. “But, once you go through that, once you go through those heartbreaks you get to a place where you remember how it feels and you wake up the next day and you're like, ‘yeah, life goes on, it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be’. “It’s going through those times, especially in recent memory, where the last few years I've had chances to win some of the biggest golf tournaments in the world and it hasn't quite happened. But life moves on. You dust yourself off and you go again.” Though not quite as sore as his loss to Bryson DeChambeau in that US Open last June, McIlroy also suffered a dose of disappointment in the 150th Open as Cameron Smith denied him at St Andrews in 2022. It was before then, though, that he’d realised that the sun still rises every day even if losing out can prove painful. “I think it was after the 2019 season,” he recalled. “I remember I'd had a great year. I'd won four times around the world. I'd won the FedExCup. I had my best statistical season ever. But I didn't have a great season in the major championships. “I went through a time of like, well, I'll just prepare and I'll just do the same things I do for every other week of the year but knowing that they're not every other week of the year. So I sort of made a commitment to myself from 2020 onwards to sort of earmark these four weeks a little bit more and to give a little bit more of myself in these weeks. “And, if you look at my major record since 2020 until now compared to, say, the five years previous when I won the PGA in '14, I think you'll see a big difference, and that was just sitting down and reflecting at the end of 2019 thinking that I need to approach these a little bit differently again.” McIlroy laughed about how his daughter, Poppy, recently asked if he was “famous” after some of her school-mates had been talking about him and, as a proud father now, being able to join Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods on that career grand slam list would mean more than ever to him. “Over the course of my career, I think I've shown quite a lot of resilience from setbacks, and I feel like I've done the same again, especially post-June last year and the golf that I've played since then, and it's something that I'm really proud of,” he said. “When you have a long career like I have had, luckily, you sort of just learn to roll with the punches, the good times, the bad times, knowing that if you do the right work and you practice the right way, that those disappointments will turn into good times again pretty soon.” Maybe even as soon as Sunday.