Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

For fans of Wild and Lab Girl, Heartbreak is a uniquely immersive audiobook, merging science and self-discovery to change the way we think about loneliness, health, and what it means to fall in and out of love.

When her twenty-five-year marriage unexpectedly falls apart, journalist Florence Williams expects the loss to hurt. What she doesn’t expect is that she’ll end up in the hospital, examining close-up the way our cells listen to loneliness. 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.

In Williams’s search for insight as well as personal strategies to game her way back to health, she tries it all–and listeners can hear it all–including exclusive (astonishing) bonus material from Williams’s most intimate moments: live and unscripted therapy sessions, gabfests with girlfriends, and the making and breaking of new romantic relationships. Join her in the laboratory as she tests her blood for genetic markers of grief, hear every sound of the wilderness as she searches for awe as an antidote to loneliness, and be a fly on the wall as she is guided through psilocybin and MDMA therapy.

Narrated by the author and accompanied by in-the-moment diary recordings and interviews, Heartbreak is an immersive audiobook that taps into one of the most shared experiences in the animal kingdom: heartbreak.