Meredith Goldstein, the Boston Globe advice columnist, was fighting off a case of “chair anxiety” in early October, just before the audience began to file in for her talk about her recent book, Can’t Help Myself: Lessons and Confessions from a Modern Advice Columnist. Would anyone show up and fill the chairs? Or would there not be enough of them? As a good crowd had settled in, she said, hopefully, “Library events always bring out the best questions.”
She began writing for the Boston Globe 15 years ago, doing features for the living arts and entertainment sections, covering the North Shore. She became “charmed” by what she called the ‘weird’ attachment people in New England have to this being their “home,” not something she found as much in Maryland, where she grew up. But after a few years reporting on the North Shore, she talked then-Boston Globe editor, Marty Barron, into what she described a “more voyeuristic exercise” to benefit Boston readers, namely an advice column. When she first broached the subject, Barron asked her, “What are you talking about? I am closing foreign bureaus and you want me to pay you to start an advice column?” Goldstein argued that, as with the very popular Ann Landers, the letter writers will tell you “what’s playing among people.” Barron agreed, but said she’d have to do it “on top of her regular assignments.”
The rest is history, of course. Goldstein was never asked about her qualifications for an advice column but then again, who would be the right person to answer readers’ heartfelt questions, she asked? “Therapists would be too responsible to advise strangers about personal problems in 300 words,” she pointed out. The first five years of writing the column coincided with her mother dying of cancer and a boyfriend who had dumped her. “The column is what pulled me through. It was a life line,” she said.
Describing herself as someone who, at 42, is more likely to watch tv in her pajamas than going on dates, she has noticed there is a sort of dating fatigue developing in general, perhaps as a result of the availability of so many dating sites. “You tend to have to check it all day long,” she pointed out. And she finds there are fewer letters about people snooping in their partners’ emails and discovering something upsetting, which then has to be revealed by admitting they were snooping, itself a transgression. Goldstein thinks the decline in snooping-related problems is due to “better passwords.”
A Boston Globe feature Goldstein wrote in August examined a rise in respect and the increasing popularity of romance novels, which she said was especially noticeable after the 2016 election. “Getting respect for romance books took way too long,” she said. “It’s true it is formulaic, but so are mystery novels.” In line with the closely related quest for personal happiness she addresses in her advice columns, she recently started a podcast which focuses on one subject per season. The first three are: the best way to get over a breakup; how to meet people; and how do you know someone is The One.
Breakups are really problematic, Goldstein reported. And there’s a gender difference in how people react: Men are told the “man up,” and women are advised “to take your time” to get over it. She discovered that there was a “breaking-up summit for teens” in the Boston area, which made her think that such seminars could benefit adults, as well.
Her Love Letters advice column has been running online and in the paper since 2009. Can’t Help Myself is based on the author’s column in the Boston Globe and includes stories about work romances, millennial friends, sickness and health, and grilled cheese. The column runs Monday to Friday on Boston.com, and in the print edition of the Boston Globe on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Previous novels include Chemistry Lessons, a young-adult novel about a young woman who uses science to manipulate her love life; and The Singles, about a group of dateless guests at a wedding. Goldstein has been interviewed by – and written for – the Washington Post, Bustle, Elite Daily, Apartment Therapy, Shondaland, and Real Simple.