Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific JourneyW. W. Norton & Company, 2022 M02 1 - 304 pages Winner of the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award 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. |
Contents
Hindu Kush | |
A Costly Life Event | |
OG | |
PART TWO ALONE | |
Truth Serum Part | |
Warmth | |
The Science of | |
Split Mountain | |
Confluence | |
Social WellBeing | |
Truth Serum Part | |
The Divorce Drug | |
Rejection | |
Grief | |
Attachment | |
Your Cells Are Listening | |
The Body Doesnt | |
Shaggy Birds | |
The Wizards of Lonesome | |
PART THREE | |
Open Sesame | |
Opioids Love and the Science of Recovery | |
The Future of Heartbreak | |
The Personality of the Body | |
A Boat of Lettuce | |
Acknowledgments | |
Notes | |