Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey

"This is an amazing book. It doesn’t feel like a science book when you’re reading it—you don’t get that professorial tone. It’s a very personal book about a woman who is going through a divorce, a topic that we don’t really think science can handle: falling in and out of love. So it’s a completely unexpected book on a topic you wouldn’t think science could touch. But it is, it’s very scientific. She cites some really amazing studies of hormones, psychological tests, the science of why it hurts so much to be broken up with, and how evolution has made this happen. We’re meant to stay together long enough to make the next generation. It’s also a hilarious book, there are parts that are laugh-out-loud funny. She has the ability to laugh at herself—a depressed woman going through mourning and recovery. One of the weaknesses of the science book genre—unlike, say, fiction —is that it doesn’t tend to have a clear plot direction. But this one does. It’s pretty much chronological, and she fits the science in around it. And some of the science stories are really memorable. She talks about ‘the hot sauce test’, which gauges how vindictive people can be to each other. They had participants work together with a partner, a fake partner who is actually a scientist who annoys them by leaving the room for a long time. At some point they have an opportunity to give that partner an amount of hot sauce as punishment. It doesn’t matter how much—it’s not graded or anything—they just have to decide how much to give them to eat. It turns out that men give four times the amount of hot sauce that women do. They’re extremely vindictive, wow. “Science books are getting much more diverse, which is great, and they are attacking topics we haven’t seen before” She links it to domestic violence; she says that men basically have trouble limiting the penalty to others when they are hurt emotionally. So it’s a hilarious experiment, but it also has some deeper meaning. I think when you can laugh, but can better see where she’s coming from. So, for me, I was really happy that this book won. It’s a shorter book. Some science books can really go on and on, but Florence Williams doesn’t, plus she’s a hilarious and very, very engaging writer. And the topic, the psychology of love, could help bring the science genre to a broader audience. Not everyone wants to read about physics or math, but pretty much everyone has experienced being dumped. We also thought it was a good book for our era. The Covid generation has seen many deaths in the past few years, and many of us have spent a lot of time alone. This book talks about loneliness and the hormones linked to that. That was important for us too. I’m really happy that this is our winner."