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Advice columnist ‘Dear Margo’ is retiring

Courtesy of Margo Howard

By now, says Margo Howard, people who obsessively read her advice column — and there are many — can predict what she’s going to say. “They already know what I think about a lot of issues,” says Howard (inset), who’s better known to her readers as “Dear Margo” and, before that, “Dear Prudence.” “There’s no more for me to say in the advice genre.” And so, after 15 years of dispensing straightforward, funny, sometimes scandalous advice, Howard, who lives in Cambridge, is hanging it up. Her last syndicated column will appear in the Globe on May 17. In her final column, Howard reveals that she’s not retiring to spend more time with her family. “But rather,” she writes, “to spend more time with my inner-child . . . the one who has lunch with girlfriends, shops, sleeps late, and ploughs though decades of files (kind of a jumped-up version of straightening up your sock drawer).” Howard got into the advice game later in life, but it was in her blood all along. Her mother was Eppie Lederer, the woman known to millions of newspaper readers as Ann Landers. “I have the gene,” says Howard. “People said I was her for the next generation, and maybe I was.”