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“Compelling. . . . [Talve-Goodman] is a sharp observer, funny, grateful and very likeable. . . . Her essays will reverberate in many hearts.” —Hadassah Magazine
“Deeply felt, beautifully expressed essays . . . provide rare insight forged by years of coping with illness.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Talve-Goodman blends humor, humility and compassion so seamlessly, you can’t help but be captivated. The book reads like she is speaking to you.” —St. Louis Jewish Light
“Packs a punch. . . . A raw, deeply honest collection of writing that looks squarely at the hard stuff but also celebrates life.” —Book Riot
“A frank, incisively charismatic text. . . . The mind at work in these pages is sharp and funny.” —Washington Square Review
“Crisp, unpretentious.” —DIAGRAM
“Thoughtful and sensitive.” —LitMed Database
“[Talve-Goodman] transformed her physical limitations into an outward source of strength, and her vividly drawn essays effectively enlighten and educate. . . . Heartfelt and richly passionate.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Reflective and forthright. . . . Illustrating the complex experience of organ transplantation and chronic illness, the essays of Your Hearts, Your Scars . . . explore what it means to be alive, to have a body, and to come back from the brink of death.” —Foreword Reviews
“Ponders the precariousness of life for the chronically ill and disabled [in] seven poignant autobiographical essays about living joyfully and looking for love in spite of chronic illness.” —Shelf Awareness
“Adina Talve-Goodman walked a tightrope, for much of her thirty-one years, between life and death. Perhaps for this reason, Adina embodied life more than any person I’ve ever met. She lit up rooms with pure joy and kindness and, although this phrase is often overused, to know Adina was to love her. I’m grateful this beautiful book exists, so everyone else can know her, too. Adina was a brilliant writer, and these pages are imbued with her exuberance, her sharp humor, and both versions of her spectacular heart.” —Ann Napolitano, author of Dear Edward and Hello Beautiful
“This book is so full of life that it’s hard to believe the amazing young woman who wrote it is no longer walking among us. Adina has left an indelible mark on this world. Her extraordinary gifts, her irrepressible spirit, live on.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance and Signal Fires
“Your Hearts, Your Scars tells of hearts broken and whole, hearts always shared—by families, by lovers, by transplant recipients and their donors. The book’s incisions expose all these beating hearts and the hearts of Adina’s reading public, who can only imagine what this visionary artist would have created next.” —Rita Charon, MD, PhD, author of Narrative Medicine and The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine
“Adina’s writing is incisive and inventive. The energy coursing through her prose is positively contagious. This is not a book to be missed!” —Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, Editor-in-Chief of Bellevue Literary Review and author of When We Do Harm
2022-11-24
A heart-transplant recipient shares her personal journey.
In this posthumously published essay collection, Talve-Goodman (1986-2018) openly shares the history of her body. Born with a congenital heart condition, she chronicles her medical experiences ranging from an 11-hour marathon back surgery that untethered her spinal cord to the implantation of her new heart in 2006 when she was 19. A collaborative effort “made out of love and grief,” the text, edited by the author’s sister and novelist Tinti, mixes creative nonfiction, memoir, and critical theory. In the opening essay, the author recalls a night as a 20-year-old college student when she exposed her chest to a boyfriend and admitted to having had a heart transplant just one year prior. In another impassioned story, she recounts a memorable trip to San Diego with a group of other teens with organ transplants, noting the solidarity of people with “displaced” kidneys, livers, and hearts and how the identities of their donors can become a vexing mystery. Talve-Goodman candidly reflects on her own physical self-consciousness, graphically describing squirmy biopsy procedures. After a two-year wait for a new heart and countless surgeries, she admits, “I wasn’t good at much, but I was good at waiting.” The daughter of two rabbis, the author’s pride in her Jewish heritage infuses many essays, most of which read like nimble coming-of-age diary entries. Other pieces find her trying to harmonize with the “dead person’s heart” beating rapidly in her chest (a transplant typically takes a year to “thaw and reach its capacity”) or offering panicked discourse on organ donors and their correlation to “zombies.” While crafting her essays, Talve-Goodman became unexpectedly ill and succumbed to lymphoma in 2018 at age 31. Never maudlin or overly sympathetic, the book shows how she transformed her physical limitations into an outward source of strength, and her vividly drawn essays effectively enlighten and educate.
Heartfelt and richly passionate impressions from a creative writer gone too soon.
