Welcome to GabFest reads, a monthly series from the Political GabFest. I'm David Plotz,

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-expermentation, so it'll be

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, D.C., 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.

It's also personal for me because Florence, you're a friendly acquaintance who became a real friend as you were working on this book because you were going through a heartbreak. You were sort of maybe a year ahead of me on the heartbreak train as I was going through a heartbreak,

as my heartbreak was beginning. We both, as I said, live here in Washington, we both saw

20 plus year marriages collapse at kind of unexpectedly around us and you were a guide and counselor

to me. You know, there's a way to the other side for most of us. And I want to hope that you can be

a figure of hope and possibility for Gap Fest listeners who might be having distress now because

of a loss of love. So it's a big task. It's a big responsibility for you.

It is. Well, I hope so too. And I hope it was helpful to you. And I hope it will be helpful to others.

All right. I'm sure it will. So, all right, let's get to the basics. So you've written a book called

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