HEARTBREAK: A PERSONAL AND SCIENTIFIC JOURNEY
FLORENCE WILLIAMS
� 2022 Norton
$30.00
296 pages

She met him on a college camping trip.

He was the leader of the group, "a senior wearing John Lennon glasses and a blue bandanna..." They had identical last names; she joked that they "should get married someday!" Later, after sharing adventures and falling in love, they did.

The first years were filled with great excitement: skiing, rafting, hiking, and "large and small triumphs and challenges." Then came a son, then a daughter, and Florence Williams realized that she was staying behind more often than not, while her husband continued on "through the rapids and the ski chutes..." She thought that was normal, but "what I see now is that it was the beginning of the end."

He said he wanted to "find his soulmate." She was gobsmacked. He moved out, and they sent the kids to summer camp while they figured out the next steps. She held on to hope, feeling "sure we could put all the pieces back, but he was already boxing up the puzzle."

Devastation is a mild word for what Williams felt. She stopped eating, lost weight, became seriously physically ill — which was not unusual, she learned. She wanted love and started dating in all the wrong places. She found a therapist and an acupuncturist, attended an EMDR workshop, had blood tests to track her progress, and fought loneliness. She volunteered, and explored the subject of grief. And in the end, the thing that might've helped most was an age-old cure...

Poets and songsters have been praising love for centuries. Billions of dollars are spent on romance novels annually in the US. We have an entire holiday dedicated to love, for cryin' out loud. But the opposite — heartbreak — is, "until recently, understudied." So what have we learned so far?

Much of the answer to that is in Heartbreak, and Williams makes it relevant through the power of story. She lays her soul bare here, exploring her own emotions and making readers keenly understand her experiences with a very unexpected love loss and what science says about its physical and mental effects.

There's a lot of camaraderie and comfort in that, and some readers may find familiarity in the tale. They'll also see new findings: the unsurprising, the unconventional, the (for most of us) unreachable, and the unbelievable.

Still, if you know the pain and gut-twist of rejection and love lost, there's help for the lovelorn in this book. True, you might heal from divorce just fine without Heartbreak, or you might find its support heavenly.