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Florence Williams is the author of The Nature Fix and Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, which is a beautiful exploration of the end of her marriage—and its impact on her health and her soul. Florence met her husband in college and had never lived alone—much less alone as a middle-aged woman. Their divorce and her resulting heartbreak turned her upside-down, and filled her with an incapacitating amount of anxiety and fear. The resulting memoir offers a map as she returns to herself. Ever the science writer, this isn’t just a treatise on her feelings of rejection and loss—this is also a thoroughly researched guide to the implications of heartbreak on our hearts, full of learnings for all of us.
MORE FROM FLORENCE WILLIAMS:
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TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: Well, I loved Heartbreak. I am watching this tendency in myself to only commend, not only commend. But I love memoirs that are structured in a way that support these bigger conversations. And I'm only watching it in myself because I feel like it, there's like this in this feminine instinct to be useful all the time and to make our lives helpful for other people when sometimes living your life is enough. But I will say, thank you for using your own heartbreak as a way to talk about what happens to us. I think anyone listening has been through this cycle and to honor it with a scientific survey of what is happening to us makes it a pretty fascinating read, I have to say. So I'm sorry that your life had to go up on a pire in that way for this book.