A successful Chicago newspaper columnist and magazine writer early in her career, Margo Howard kept her distance from her famous family’s profession of handing out advice until she was 57, when her favorite editor persuaded her to take over writing the “Dear Prudence” column for the online magazine Slate in 1998.
Her mother was the legendary Esther “Eppie” Lederer, whose Ann Landers advice column reached about 1,200 newspapers and 90 million readers at the time of her death in 2002. Before writing “Dear Prudence,” Ms. Howard had brushed aside numerous other editors who wanted her to follow in her mother’s advice-giving footsteps. She even turned down her mother’s offer to simply take over the daily Ann Landers column. “Honey, I don’t want to work that hard,” she told her.
At Slate, editor Michael Kinsley offered Ms. Howard something different: one “Dear Prudence” column a week instead of her mother’s every-day grind, and she only had to field emailed inquiries from readers.
“I didn’t have to deal with the picture in my head of my mother with letters, pounds and pounds and tons and tons of letters. No paper would pass through my hands,” she told interviewer Connie Martinson in California in 2003. “When I started, I must tell you I was the most surprised of anybody. I loved it.”
Ms. Howard, who drew wisdom from her own experiences while writing online advice columns and a memoir during three decades in Cambridge, died July 13. She was 86, had retired to Sarasota, Fla., several years ago, and her health had declined over the past couple of years, her family said.
Business success and advice column fame formed Ms. Howard’s early life. Her father, Jules Lederer, helped launch Budget Rent-a-Car. Her mother’s twin, Pauline Phillips, penned the Dear Abby advice column that was a newspaper rival to Ann Landers, creating a sibling rivalry that sometimes edged into bitterness.
Ms. Howard earned her own international fame, especially when many newspapers that had carried Ann Landers began publishing a print version of “Dear Prudence” as a replacement upon Mrs. Lederer’s death.
But Ms. Howard always made clear she was her own writer and was taking her own approach to advice. The online “Dear Prudence” column was never just Ann Landers 2.0.
“I’m just doing what I do. I write for Slate. I’m a Slate girl. One a week,” she told The Boston Globe a month after her mother died. “I’m not a competitor of hers or anyone. I felt I’ve never had any competitors.”
With “Dear Prudence,” she didn’t mimic her mother’s zeal for consulting experts and dropping their names into responses to readers’ questions.
“I didn’t want to do that,” Ms. Howard told The Atlantic magazine in 2014. “I was thrice divorced, analyzed, bordering on elderly, and I thought, My answers are going to come from my experiences.”
Indeed, Ms. Howard had ample material from her own life for years of advice columns and her 2014 memoir, “Eat, Drink & Remarry: Confessions of a Serial Wife,” with its candid recollections of her four marriages, rendered in her unforgettable voice.
Because of her parents’ successes, celebrities had long drifted through her personal life. Elizabeth Taylor “babysat me once in Palm Springs, when I was 12 and she was about 19,” Ms. Howard recalled in a 2016 Sarasota magazine interview.
Ms. Howard profiled famous interviewees in her Chicago newspaper columns and freelance magazine years as well. Meanwhile, journalism luminaries recognized and encouraged her writing.
She said the late Chicago Tribune movie critic Gene Siskel helped her get her start as a writer. J. Anthony Lukas, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his “Common Ground” book-length examination of busing for Boston school desegregation, was an “early beau” after Ms. Howard’s first divorce.
“He was my journalism school,” she told Martinson. “I would ask him my questions.”
Her anecdotes were as riveting as they were plentiful, friends said.
“She walked into the room and the room was hers,” said Ilana Diamond Rovner, a friend of more than 50 years who is a senior judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. “Everyone wanted to sit next to her at a dinner party. She was so witty, so entertaining, so original.”
Ms. Howard was “funny, perverse, quirky — all of the above in great abundance,” said Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris of Cambridge.
“And there may be something absurd about saying this,” he added, chuckling, “but she was somebody you could always ask for advice.”
Ms. Howard was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on March 15, 1940, and spent part of her childhood in Eau Claire, Wis., before her parents settled in Chicago.
“Being an only child,” she told Martinson, “I had a very close and good relationship with both my parents.”
So close that when she was an adult and her father spoke to her about seeing another woman, Ms. Howard was the one who encouraged her mother to end the marriage.
So close, too, that Ms. Howard’s first two books were the biography “Eppie: The Story of Ann Landers” (1982) and “A Life in Letters: Ann Landers’ Letters to Her Only Child” (2003).
Ms. Howard went to the private Francis W. Parker School in Chicago before attending Brandeis University, which she left before graduating to marry businessman John B. Coleman, with whom she had three children.
That marriage ended in divorce, as did a second, briefer marriage to funeral home executive Jules Furth.
Her third husband, Emmy Award-winning actor Ken Howard, “was terrific,” Ms. Howard said in a 2023 interview posted online. “He was a great father substitute to the children.”
Though she called him “Mr. Right No. 3” in her memoir, their marriage also ended. “I don’t really know when trouble found us,” she wrote.
She settled in Cambridge after her third divorce. Her final marriage was to Dr. Ronald Weintraub, former chief of cardiac surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
He is among her survivors, as are her two daughters, Abra Coleman of Minneapolis and Cricket Coleman of New York City; a son, Adam Coleman Howard of London; and seven grandchildren.
Per Ms. Howard’s wishes, there are no plans for a memorial service, her family said.
Ms. Howard “was incredibly sweet and loving to her friends,” Morris said.
Rovner said Ms. Howard was also “absolutely brilliant. She could take the most complicated issue and in a few trenchant sentences it was all there. But most of all she was such a loving friend.”
In a 2003 New York Times interview, after publishing “A Life in Letters, Ms. Howard recounted advice she had received from her famous mother.
“One of the good things she passed on to me was that it’s almost immaterial what happens to you – it’s how you deal with it that matters,” Ms. Howard said.
“She’d say ‘When things go seriously haywire, take a nap and then get busy,’” Ms. Howard added. “I went into a depression when she died, so I had my nap. It was time to get busy. Work is a wonderful place to hide.”
She spent several years writing “Dear Prudence” for Slate before moving her advice column to Yahoo’s news site as “Dear Margo,” which was published in many print newspapers, including the Globe. Her online home at Yahoo later gave way to another, now-defunct website.
When Ms. Howard ended “Dear Margo” in 2013, she acknowledged in a Globe interview that to many readers, she had brought advice columns out of her mother’s generation and into the internet age.
“People said I was her for the next generation,” she said, “and maybe I was.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.