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. Searching for insight as well as personal strategies to game her way back to health, Williams tests her blood for genetic markers of grief, undergoes electrical shocks in a laboratory while looking at pictures of her ex and ventures to the wilderness in search of awe as an antidote to loneliness. For readers of Wild and Lab Girl, 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.

After suffering through years of unsuccessful blind dates, meet and greets and internet dating, Marion Baker was still single in her mid-forties and at her wits end. She was fed up with packing her last remnants of dignity to leave yet another failed relationship, What was the secret to lasting relationships? Marion realized she hadn't a clue. And she knew she was not alone. Marion deftly explores our self-defeating patterns - the whispers of our subconscious mind and how they lead us into heartbreak - and offers pioneering insights that give new hope for women looking for lasting love.