An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History

An award-winning poet, essayist, and writer of children's books, Zarin includes 12 essays in this work, some having appeared in such publications as the New York Times and Granta. Whether it is the hospital room where she sits by her daughter's bedside or the offices of The New Yorker where she worked after college, Zarin evokes the scenes and the milieu for the reader in these personal recollections, written over the past 10 years but covering her entire life. Sometimes there is too much back and forth between past and present or in establishing which husband she is talking about, so that the thread of the piece is lost, but in the majority of the pieces she is an able guide and holds readers' interest. That she does so with such idiosyncratic and personal topics as coats or her tailor is all the more commendable.