Ask Amy

Seven days a week, year in and year out, Amy Dickinson has taken on life’s greatest and smallest questions. Her readers ask her about their relationship dramas, parenting dilemmas, and workplace complaints, offering a glimpse into the everyday and offbeat struggles we all sometimes confront. Amy responds with bracing honesty and gentle humor, presenting clear-eyed solutions to sometimes confounding problems. Her insights—and the weekly look into the lives of strangers—have kept readers turning to her column for almost two decades now. Ask Amy: Essential Wisdom from America’s Favorite Advice Columnist collects some of the most intriguing questions and incisive responses from the Ask Amy column. Have you ever wondered whether your spouse was having a phone affair? Or what you could do about obnoxious gym-goers, coworkers, siblings, and children? Maybe, maybe not—but either way, Amy’s direct and no-nonsense thinking may help solve the problems you’re facing, too. Ask Amy is an essential and entertaining collection of advice, written in the tone of a best friend who gives the hard truth and a comforting hand in troubled times. Her readers’ questions may seem odd or unsolvable, but they’re a reminder that we all have problems we might need a little help fixing.

In Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things--her follow-up memoir to the NYT bestselling The Mighty Queens of Freeville--America's most popular advice columnist, "Ask Amy," shares her journey of family, second chances, and finding love. By peeling back the curtain of her syndicated advice column, Amy Dickinson reveals much of the inspiration and motivation that has fueled her calling. Through a series of linked essays, this moving narrative picks up where her earlier memoir left off. Exploring central themes of romance, death, parenting, self-care, and spiritual awakening, this touching and heartfelt homage speaks to all who have faced challenges in the wake of life's twists and turns. From finding love in middle-age to her storied experience with stepparenting to overcoming disordered eating to her final moments spent with her late mother, Dickinson's trademark humorous tone delivers punch and wit that will empower, entertain, and heal.

For a decade, Amy Dickinson has been the Chicago Tribune's signature general advice columnist, helping readers with questions both personal and pressing. Ask Amy: Advice for Better Living is a collection of over 200 question-and-answer columns taken from 2011–2013. As the highly popular successor to the legendary Ann Landers, Dickinson answers readers' questions with care and attention, while also providing a plainspoken, straight-shooting dose of reality that often only comes to us from close friends. Dickinson's advice is rooted in honesty and trust, which is why so many readers turn to her for advice on their everyday lives and for maintaining healthy, lasting relationships. Ask Amy: Advice for Better Living is a testament to the empathetic counsel and practical common-sense tips that Dickinson has been distilling for years.

Ballet intrigue, a best friend predicament, and a bullying problem to solve keep Amy plenty busy in a new adventure. Claire, the older sister of Amy Green’s very best friend, Mills, has a dancing dilemma. Claire has landed the lead in Budapest Ballet Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet. It’s the role of a lifetime (not to mention that her Romeo is the hot and talented Hungarian dancer Péter Bako), so why does she seem so depressed? And why won’t she talk to anyone about what’s bothering her? Amy Green and her aunt Clover, advice-givers extraordinaire, are coming to the rescue. It may take some serious snooping and a trip to Budapest, but Amy and Clover are determined to help the budding ballet star get back on her feet.

Love drama is on the rise as Amy’s mom prepares for her wedding, Aunt Clover dates a hot musician, and Amy takes on the mystery of her friend’s cheating beau. There’s love drama going on all around Amy Green. Her mom is getting ready for her bachelorette party and wedding, Aunt Clover is dating a hot singer in a band, and Amy’s best friend, Mills, has fallen head-over-heels for the new guy in school, Bailey. When Bailey cheats on Mills, Amy is determined to get to the bottom of it, but what she finds is more than she bargained for! Factor in a dreamy "Irish Surfing Chef," a painful family secret, and Clover in need of a confidence boost as she ponders starting college after an exciting gap year as an advice columnist. Cue sidekick Amy to the rescue with advice and support!

Little changes can make a big, big difference! In The Little Book of Big Change, psychologist Amy Johnson shows you how to rewire your brain and overcome your bad habits—once and for all. No matter what your bad habit is, you have the power to change it. Drawing on a powerful combination of neuroscience and spirituality, this book will show you that you are not your habits. Rather, your habits and addictions are the result of simple brain wiring that is easily reversed. By learning to stop bad habits at the source, you will take charge of your habits and addictions for good. Anything done repeatedly has the potential to form neural circuitry in the brain. In this light, habits and addictions are impersonal brain wiring problems that result from taking your habitual thinking as truth, and acting on that thinking in the form of doing your habit—over and over. This book offers a number of small changes you can make in your everyday life that will help you stop your bad habit in its tracks. If you want to understand the science behind your habit, make the decision to end it, and commit to real, lasting change, this book will help you to finally take charge of your life—once and for all.

Her teenage aunt writes an advice column. But what if Amy needs boy tips of her own? A witty take on the ups and downs of friends, family, and first romance. Thirteen-year-old Amy Green has a lot to juggle: handling divorced parents, minding messy baby siblings, and navigating snobby cliques at school. So when her cool but crazy seventeen-year-old aunt, Clover, lands a job giving advice for the teen mag The Goss, Amy jumps at the chance to help out as her sidekick. Of course, Amy hadn’t counted on falling for the cute but aloof boy in her art class or her best friends snubbing her. Can she find a way out of her own dilemma?

What role did America's newspaper advice columnists play in shaping and forming societal attitudes toward LGBTQ people throughout the 20th century? They served the dual function of offering advice and satisfying the curious. They also often provided the first mention of homosexuality outside of newspaper crime blotters. More than 100 million readers regularly read the columns. This book chronicles some of the most popular and widely circulated newspaper columns between the 1930s and 2000, including Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Helen Help Us!, Dr. Joyce Brothers, The Worry Clinic, Dear Meg, Ask Beth, and Savage Love. It examines the function of these columns regarding the place of LGBTQ people in America and what role they played in forming a public opinion. From these columns, we learn not only the framework of how straight Americans understood their homosexual brethren, but also how attitudes and feelings continued to evolve.