Welcome to Gapfest Reads, a monthly series from the political Gapfest.

I'm David Plott's, and this month I'm super happy to talk with my friend, Florence Williams,

who's the author of Heartbreak, a personal and scientific journey, which is out this month.

Hi, Florence.

Hello, David. I'm so honored and pleased to be your guinea pig for this series.

Thanks for having me.

Well, you're always good on self-experimentation.

So it'll be good to self-experiment with this podcast form.

And what's more, Florence, you've done an amazing, enhanced audiobook with my old colleague,

Jacob Weisberg over at Pushkin, with notes, audio notes that you took as you were reporting,

and interviews with people, and what else is in that?

Yeah, we slid in actual tape from some of my therapy sessions, and some of it's pretty raw.

It features material that's not in the book.

And the interview with one of the guys you rebounded with a little bit?

Yes. Oh, yes. He is heavily featured, in fact.

Yeah. So I want to give a little bit of background on Florence.

So Florence is a science journalist, a very distinguished science journalist.

She's based here in Washington, DC, like me, although we're in different rooms,

and she is the author of two celebrated earlier books, Breasts,

A Natural and Unnatural History, and The Nature Fix.

And I wanted to have her on this month, because heartbreak is a very personal book.

It's a very personal book, obviously, for Florence, as she will talk about.

...