Professor and award-winning journalist Lisa A. Phillips’ newest book, First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak, published by Rowman & Littlefield/Bloomsbury (February 2025), chronicles the challenges today’s adolescents face as they navigate crushes, dating, and breakups — and the challenges adults face as they strive to provide guidance and support.

Phillips is a former Newtown resident. She graduated from Newtown High School in 1986, her first byline was in this newspaper, and her first job was at C.H. Booth Library.

Now living in New York’s Hudson Valley, Phillips will return to her former hometown and the library on Tuesday, June 3, when she will be the featured author during a program from 7 to 7:45 that evening.

In First Love, Phillips sheds light on how the relationships teens have today are different from their parent’s generation, including their reliance on technology and social media, the rise of young people identifying as LGBTQ+, high rates of depression and anxiety, and consent consciousness.

She provides concrete strategies and insights from experts and teens themselves on ways parents and other adults can help young people cope with the timeless issues of love and heartbreak.

Told from the perspective of a professor, mother, and award-winning journalist, First Love is a critical resource for parents, educators, mental health professionals, and others who want to understand the new realities of teen relationships — and help teens become caring, self-aware, and thriving young adults.

First Love has already been featured in OprahDaily, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Irish Independent, The Globe and Mail, SheKnows, and other national and international publications.

Phillips has been interviewed on NPR’s IA and Here and Now, WGN-TV, and a wide range of podcasts about parenting, relationships, and books.

Jennifer Senior, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize and author of The New York Times bestseller All Joy and No Fun, calls First Love “one of the best books I’ve ever read about both parenting and parenthood.”

Richard Weissbourd, author of The Parents We Mean To Be and faculty director of Making Caring Common at Harvard Graduate School of Education, says parents usually “fuss a lot about how to have the ‘sex talk’ with our kids, but we fuss far less about a topic that is certainly just as important: how to talk to our teens about romantic love and, specifically, about the riptides of first love.

“Lisa Phillips deftly guides us through these waters,” he continued. “There is so much that is important and useful about this engaging, insightful book.”

Phillips has written about relationships, mental health, and teens for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Longreads, Psychology Today, Cosmopolitan, Salon, and other outlets. She has written two previous books Unrequited: The Thinking Woman’s Guide to Romantic Obsession and Public Radio: Behind the Voices.

She teaches journalism and the popular “Love and Heartbreak” seminar at the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Registration is requested for her June 3 program at C.H. Booth Library; call 203-426-4533 or visit chboothlibrary.org.