Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

by Florence Williams

Overview

Winner of the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

A Five Books "Best Literary Science Writing" Book of 2023 • A Smithsonian Best Science Book of 2022 • A Prospect Magazine Top Memoir of 2022 • A KCRW Life Examined Best Book of 2022

"Keen observer [and] deft writer" (David Quammen) Florence Williams explores the fascinating, cutting-edge science of heartbreak while seeking creative ways to mend her own.

When her twenty-five-year marriage suddenly falls apart, journalist Florence Williams expects the loss to hurt. But when she starts feeling physically sick, losing weight and sleep, she sets out in pursuit of rational explanation. She travels to the frontiers of the science of "social pain" to learn why heartbreak hurts so much—and why so much of the conventional wisdom about it is wrong.

Soon Williams finds herself on a surprising path that leads her from neurogenomic research laboratories to trying MDMA in a Portland therapist’s living room, from divorce workshops to the mountains and rivers that restore her. She tests her blood for genetic markers of grief, undergoes electrical shocks while looking at pictures of her ex, and discovers that our immune cells listen to loneliness. Searching for insight as well as personal strategies to game her way back to health, she seeks out new relationships and ventures into the wilderness in search of an extraordinary antidote: awe.

With warmth, daring, wit, and candor, Williams offers a gripping account of grief and healing. Heartbreak is a remarkable merging of science and self-discovery that will change the way we think about loneliness, health, and what it means to fall in and out of love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324003496
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	31,389
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

A contributing editor at Outside magazine, Florence Williams is the author of Breasts, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The Nature Fix. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, and many other outlets. She lives in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1 Shatter

1 Bridge to Nowhere 11

2 The Heart 19

3 Hindu Kush 31

4 A Costly Life Event 42

5 OG Sin 56

Part 2 Alone

6 All Pain Is One Malady: Rejection 73

7 Heartbreak Hotel: Grief 82

8 Welcome to the Eremocene: Attachment 94

9 Your Cells Are Listening 107

10 The Body Doesn't Lie 114

11 Shaggy Birds 132

12 The Wizards of Lonesome 142

Part 3 Awe

13 Truth Serum, Part One 155

14 High Island: Warmth 164

15 Excuse My Piloerection: The Science of Awe 175

16 Split Mountain 183

17 Confluence 203

18 The Happiness That Matters: Social Well-Being 218

19 Truth Serum, Part Two 226

20 The Divorce Drug 231

21 Open Sesame 241

22 Man in the Kastle: Opioids, Love, and the Science of Recovery 251

23 The Future of Heartbreak 260

24 The Personality of the Body 265

25 A Boat of Lettuce 271

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 280

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/06/2021

“Much has been written about the science of falling in love, but very little about what happens on the other side,” writes journalist Williams (The Nature Fix) in this show-stopping, offbeat story about the science of heartbreak. Deciding to unravel “what the heck had happened to the woman I used to be” after her 25-year marriage ended, and aiming to understand how “heartbreak changes our neurons, our bodies, and our sense of ourselves,” Williams visits psychologists, geneticists, and others researching emotion and behavior. She cites studies showing divorce to be a greater health risk than smoking; hears about experiments on monogamous prairie voles, in which those separated from their partners produce more stress hormones; and learns about “broken-heart syndrome,” the symptoms of which are similar to a heart attack. Along the way, she fills out reams of health evaluations and tries dozens of healing methods, including taking Ecstasy (she hallucinates becoming a tree and her ex-husband “a strangler fig”) and a solo whitewater rafting trip (“I was flowing away from the broken bad lands of my marriage”). Unflagging research—she even flies to London to interview Britain’s first “minister of loneliness”—and the author’s vulnerability make for an impressive and moving survey. This is a courageous, whirlwind tale of healing and self-discovery. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"[Readers] will learn as much from Williams’s intellectual rigor as from her fearlessness in surviving a broken heart."

Sebastian Modak

"Edifying and entertaining... [A] fascinating, memorable quest to survive and thrive in an often-heartbreaking world."

BookPage (starred review)

"In Heartbreak [Williams] reprises [the] determined, deep-dive reporting [of The Nature Fix], this time seeking the same healing for her shattered self... This is one of the joys of reading a gifted science journalist: You learn so much stuff without having to study it yourself... [A] wise and brave book."

Marianne Szegedy-Maszak

"As a guide to science, Williams is the best kind—a hot adventure-nerd goddess, by turns fascinating and funny. The real magic happens, however, when she turns that eye inward, revealing herself as destroyed, vulnerable, and tentatively optimistic, sometimes all at once."

Outside - Elizabeth Hightower Allen

"This innovative book will have you rooting for Williams to understand her own body’s pain—and, by extension, all of ours."

Katie Couric Media - Zibby Owens

"This surprisingly frank and funny book is what happens when a formidable science journalist turns her powers of observation and inquiry on her own broken heart."

Bonnie Tsui

"An engrossing survey of the latest research on the cardiology, neurology and genomics of lost love punctuated by the author’s many experiments with healing... Williams’s journey through her pain is by turns wrenching, fascinating, funny, and, for so many of us, deeply relatable."

Scientific American - Dana Dunham

"Fascinating."

People Magazine

"What a powerful book. Williams captures the heartache of divorce and the crooked road back to living. Colorful, imaginative and poignant—Heartbreak tells a gripping story of courage, sex, and adventure packed with all the newest hard science on romance and attachment. I’ve studied love for over 40 years and I was taking notes. It’s a magnificent, wise, and remarkable read!"

Helen Fisher

"I tore through this book, unable to do anything else. Even sleep. Florence Williams has taken the most common form of psychic pain––heartbreak, her heartbreak––and transformed it into a meditative masterwork on what it means to live a good life, with biological and genetic markers and dozens of scientific studies to back up her claims. Awe: remember this word. You will feel it at the end of this book, and it could save your life."

Deborah Copaken

"Heartbreak by Florence Williams is a graceful account of losing a marriage and finding another way of being. With vulnerability and veracity, Williams seeks various modes of understanding the physicality of loss. Whoever has felt the blistering heat of a broken heart will thank Florence Williams for a clear moving river of discoveries"

Terry Tempest Williams

"A masterful blend of investigative reporting and personal narrative, chock-full of fascinating insights, gorgeous nature writing and an ample helping of compassion (some of which Williams deservedly reserves for herself)."

San Francisco Chronicle - Alexis Burling

01/01/2022

While much has been written about love—both falling into it and the intense psychological changes that occur during its first stages—the same cannot be said for heartbreak. Williams (Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History) works to ameliorate this by walking readers through her own divorce and her navigation of single life, sharing custody of her children with her ex, and getting back on the dating scene. Perhaps the most compelling feature of this work is Williams's foray into the science of heartbreak. Williams uses her own body as an example of the physical manifestations of grief and trauma. After her divorce, she developed adult-onset type-1 diabetes and later learned that so-called "divorce diabetes" is not entirely uncommon. The author describes undergoing blood tests to track her grief's impact on the molecular level, experimenting with psychedelics, and much more in this heartfelt romp through her process of rediscovery and the science of heartbreak. Alongside her own story, Williams includes stories of others navigating divorce or separation. VERDICT Readers will appreciate Williams's candid portrayal of her personal journey and the book's understanding of heartbreak's impact on the human body.—Mattie Cook

Library Journal

2021-10-07
A deep dive into the meaning of heartbreak.

At 50, Williams, a contributing editor at Outsideand science writer for other publications, found herself “completely, existentially freaked” by a divorce from the man she had been with since she was 18. She immediately sought to make sense of her pain by researching heartbreak, but she discovered scant research about “what happens on the other side” of falling in love. In this three-part book, Williams draws on personal experiences, readings, and interviews to piece together her shattered emotions and explain the “complex emotional trauma” behind romantic heartbreak. The early emotional fallout of her divorce contextualizes the observations she makes in the first section. As Williams awkwardly attempted to “regain my sexual confidence” and push the boundaries of her limited romantic experiences, she also explored studies on such topics as the relationship between love and heart health and the power of awe as a tool to help the newly single “see themselves as part of a larger, meaningful reality.” In the second section, the author probes the impact of heartbreak on the body. Unexpectedly diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, she found research that showed how the stress of heartbreak and the resulting loneliness can lead to physiological problems at the cellular level. Williams then put the idea that awe can heal into practice and went on nature getaways and canoeing and rafting trips in the Rocky Mountains to help her reboot her overtaxed nervous system and “jump-start the process of calming the fuck down.” In the third section, Williams records her late-stage healing experiments with psychedelic drugs as well as an eye-opening visit to the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. Complex and thoughtfully researched, this book appealingly chronicles healing from emotional loss and offers fascinating scientific insights into the mechanics and impacts of romantic grief.

A provocative and rewarding reading experience.

Kirkus Reviews