Heartbreak, Headaches, and Other Modern Conditions
Advice from Miss Fortune, Modern Hearts Magazine, 1958–1961
Welcome to the yellowed pages of Modern Hearts Magazine, America's most questionable source of romantic guidance.
For three glorious years, readers from every corner of the nation poured their troubles into the mailbox of the magazine's resident advice columnist, Miss Fortune. Their letters arrived by the sackful: tales of impossible sweethearts, serial fiancés, chronic complainers, professional excuse-makers, amateur emperors, and men who regarded soap as a hostile political movement.
With wit, wisdom, and only occasional mercy, Miss Fortune answered them all.
Presented here for the first time is a complete collection of her most memorable columns, lovingly preserved from the magazine's celebrated golden era. Through dozens of letters and replies, readers will encounter a parade of romantic misadventures, personality defects, self-inflicted catastrophes, and spectacularly avoidable mistakes.
Inside you'll discover:
- The gentleman who feared soap.
- The bridegroom with a frequent flyer account for engagements.
- The woman who lost an argument to a cat.
- The optimism factory that converts warning signs into excuses.
- The romance drive-thru.
- Dinner with Napoleon.
- And many other unfortunate souls who wandered into Miss Fortune's office seeking comfort and accidentally received perspective instead.
Featuring vintage-inspired illustrations, fake advertisements, editorial departments, rejected letters, dictionaries of romance, and enough questionable life choices to fill several filing cabinets, Heartbreak, Headaches, and Other Modern Conditions recreates the experience of discovering a long-lost mid-century advice magazine that somehow understood modern relationships better than many modern relationship books.
Funny, insightful, and occasionally alarmingly accurate, this collection reminds us that fashions change, technology advances, and hairstyles come and go—but human beings continue finding inventive new ways to complicate perfectly good relationships.
As Miss Fortune herself often observed:
"The problem with red flags is not that they're difficult to see. It's that people keep trying to repaint them."
Open carefully.
Some of these people may remind you of someone you know.