Jeanne Phillips, the woman who has been dispensing wisdom to tens of millions of Americans under the name Dear Abby for nearly four decades, announced her retirement last Sunday. She did it in the second half of a column. After the letter about the deadbeat brother-in-law. This is either the most on-brand exit in media history or a cry for help.
How You Retire After 39 Years, Apparently
The New York Post ran the column on July 27th, and if you blinked, you missed it. The top half of the page was occupied by a perfectly serviceable letter from someone called "Conflicted in Missouri," whose husband's brother keeps ghosting the family except when he needs cash. Standard stuff. Abby gave solid advice about elder law attorneys. Fine.
Then, below the asterisks that separate one letter from the next, Jeanne Phillips quietly dropped the news that she is stepping down from the column her mother Pauline Phillips started on January 9, 1956. Seventy years of Dear Abby. Thirty-nine of them written by Jeanne. And she announced it like she was adding a P.S. to a grocery list.
She wrote, with characteristic warmth, "I am grateful for the support of my two loyal and able assistants, Steven Andrews and Jose Fuentes. Please don't worry about me; my health is fine. I plan to indulge my long-postponed itch to travel." That's it. That's the retirement speech. No press tour. No tearful farewell special. Just: I'm good, I'm leaving, the column will continue, bye.
The Woman Behind the Name Most People Never Knew
Here is the thing about Dear Abby that a lot of people never fully clocked: the column has had two Abbys. Pauline Phillips launched it in 1956 under the pen name Abigail Van Buren, a name she assembled partly from President Martin Van Buren and partly from the Book of Genesis. She wrote it for decades while her twin sister Ester Lederer was doing the exact same thing at the competing Ann Landers column, which is either the most remarkable sibling rivalry in American journalism or the setup to a joke nobody ever finished.
Jeanne Phillips, Pauline's daughter, started ghostwriting the column in the 1970s and took it over officially in 1987. She has been the sole author since 2002, when Pauline's Alzheimer's diagnosis made it impossible to continue. That means Jeanne has been writing Dear Abby, in full, for nearly a quarter century under a name that technically belongs to a character her mother invented before Jeanne was even a teenager. The column is older than the interstate highway system.
The Post notes that going forward, Dear Abby "will be written by a capable editorial staff." Which is a sentence that tells you everything and nothing simultaneously.
What Dear Abby Actually Was
It is fashionable in certain media circles to be slightly condescending about advice columns. That is a mistake. At its best, Dear Abby was one of the most democratic institutions in American publishing. Anyone could write in. Anyone could get a straight answer. For people in small towns, in bad marriages, in confusing family situations with no one they trusted enough to ask, the column was genuinely useful in a way that most journalism simply is not.
Jeanne Phillips, writing as Abby, was notably progressive on LGBTQ issues decades before it was politically comfortable to be so. She addressed HIV and AIDS with compassion when plenty of mainstream media was still treating it as a punchline or a punishment. She told people to leave abusive partners, to get therapy, to call lawyers, to set boundaries. The advice could be blunt to the point of abrasiveness, which was the whole point.
The format never changed much because it did not need to. A person writes in with a problem. Abby reads it, thinks about it, and tells them what she thinks. That's it. No algorithm. No engagement optimization. No split-testing the headline. Just a woman sitting down and trying to help strangers. Seventy years of that. You could do worse.
The Deadbeat Brother-in-Law Got More Column Inches
We should not entirely skip past the actual letter in question, because Abby's last published response is a genuinely useful piece of work and it would be rude to ignore it. "Conflicted in Missouri" has a brother-in-law, referred to as "Hank," who has essentially estranged himself from the entire family while still periodically calling his aging parents for money. He cannot keep a job. His wife refuses family gatherings. He plays the victim, according to the letter writer, with remarkable skill.
Abby's response cuts right to it: this behavior, if it escalates as the in-laws age and become more vulnerable, crosses into elder financial abuse, which is a crime. She recommends consulting an elder law attorney now, before things get worse, while the in-laws are still mentally competent to make their own decisions. It is precise, practical, and not remotely sentimental.
And then, directly below that exchange, she announced her retirement. There is something almost poetic about it. One last person with a messy family situation. One last piece of clear-eyed advice. Then the lights off and a long vacation.
The 'Editorial Staff' Era Begins
The transition to an unnamed editorial staff is not unprecedented in the advice column world, but it is not exactly comforting either. The entire value proposition of an advice column rests on the reader believing there is a specific person on the other end of the letter. Someone with opinions and a history and a consistent voice. "A capable editorial staff" is how you describe the people who write the FAQ section of a software company's website.
To be fair, Jeanne Phillips is not the first Abby. The column survived the handoff from Pauline to Jeanne, and Jeanne's voice became its own thing over time. Maybe whoever takes it over next will do the same. Maybe the brand is bigger than any individual at this point. Maybe that is fine.
Or maybe this is just what happens to everything eventually. The person who built it moves on, a team of capable professionals keeps the lights on, and in fifteen years nobody remembers there was ever a specific human being doing the work. That outcome seems worth grieving, at least a little.
The Dingo Take
The most quietly devastating thing about Jeanne Phillips' retirement announcement is not that she's leaving. It's that she announced it the exact same way she handled everything for 39 years: without fanfare, below the fold, after she'd already done the actual work. There was no press release. No goodbye tour. No Times profile with a photo of her sitting in a sunlit study surrounded by decades of reader mail. She just wrote the column, answered the letter, and then in a few hundred words at the bottom said she was done. That's either extraordinary grace or a reminder that the media industry never figured out how to celebrate the things that were actually useful to people.
The Dear Abby column ran in something like 1,400 newspapers at its peak. Pauline Phillips started it in 1956. Jeanne Phillips took it over in 1987. Between the two of them, mother and daughter spent seventy years telling Americans to leave their abusers, call their doctors, stop lending money to people who never pay it back, and treat gay family members with basic human dignity. They did this in plain English, twice a week, in the back pages of local papers next to the crossword. That is a body of work.
So: happy retirement, Jeanne Phillips. Thirty-nine years of making yourself available to strangers with problems is enough. The travel itch sounds well earned. As for "Hank" in Missouri, who has been bleeding his aging parents dry while avoiding every family photo: Abby's last piece of advice was to lawyer up before he gets any worse. Not a bad note to go out on.
