An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History
Poet, children’s author, and journalist Zarin was the fashion writer for the New Yorker while she was in her twenties in the 1980s, and her passion for beautiful fabric and well-tailored attire, especially coats, is the catalyst for many of her lustrously descriptive, complexly emotional, and exquisitely crafted personal essays. But marriage and motherhood are the lifeblood of her acute observations and incisive reflections, from an interrupted honeymoon in Italy to the terrifying title piece about her youngest daughter’s battle with a rare malady. Each episode is ensnaring, each setting scrupulously and atmospherically evoked in language silken and cut on the bias. But it is what she makes out of these reassembled remnants of memory that imbues this book with its lambent beauty and philosophical resonance. As Zarin retrieves indelible incidents from her life stained with chagrin, regret, and shock, she reflects on the quiet arts of reclamation and refurbishing, discovering in those practices––which are much like writing itself—ways to live with disquieting change, mortifying mistakes, and condemned dreams, ways to alter, mend, repair, and begin again. --Donna Seaman