Heartbreak healer

For nearly 18 years, SN&R advice columnist Joey Garcia has used her space in this weekly newspaper as a place to listen and respond to readers who are searching for answers about life and love, family and work, and everything in between. A new self-published book, When Your Heart Breaks, It's Opening to Love ($14.95) compiles, in particular, letters that focus on the kind of heartbreak brought upon by divorce, cheating and other broken relationships. While the problems depicted here are mostly common—lying boyfriends, unexpected pregnancies, dating woes, etc.—it's Garcia's answers that set her advice apart from all the other Dear Abby wannabes.

“Don't propose or say ‘I love you,' for the first time in the heat of the moment, if ‘heat' is a euphemism for sex,” Garcia tells a reader who spontaneously proposed to her boyfriend of six months after getting caught up in the “heat of the moment.”

“Great sex simulates every cell in our body into an emotional high that some people confuse with love (it's actually just a great orgasm),” she adds.

True, that.

The book is divided into sections (“Disintegration,” “Missing in Action,” “Closure” and others) and, in addition to letters, also features meditations and “prescriptions” for healing.

On Thursday, February 20, Garcia will read from and sign copies of her book at Time Tested Books. Perfect timing if your Valentine's Day ends up a bust. No cover, 7 p.m. at 1114 21st Street, www.joeygarcia.com.