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An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History
An Enlarged Heart, the exquisitely written prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin, is a poignantly understated exploration of the author’s experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time’s passage. In these intertwined episodes from her New York world and beyond, she charts the shifting and complicated parameters of contemporary life and family in writing that feels nearly fictional in its richness of scene, dialogue, and mood. The writer herself is the marvelously rueful character at the center of these tales, at first a bewildered young woman, navigating the terrain of new jobs and borrowed apartments and the rapidly fading New York of people like Mr. Ferri, the Upper East Side tailor (“a wren of a man with pins flashing in his teeth”). By the end, whether Zarin is writing about vanished restaurants, her decades-long love affair with her collection of coats, a newlywed journey to Italy, a child’s illness, Mary McCarthy’s file cabinet, or the inner life of the New Yorker staff she knew as a young woman, this history of the heart shows us how persistent the past is in returning to us with entirely new lessons, and that there are some truths not even a tailor can alter.
241 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
16 people are currently reading
221 people want to read
About the author
Cynthia Zarin
21 books31 followersCynthia Zarin is the author of five books of poetry, as well five books for children and a collection of essays. She teaches at Yale and lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
June 7, 2013
Lovely language, but the chronology of events is so confusing -- too bad the chapters aren't lyrical enough for me to suspend my disbelief or confusion. Also I was expecting, via the title and blurbs, to hear detailed accounts of Zarin's love stories, but all the boyfriend and husband/ex-husband characters are flat as can be.
October 12, 2013
This lovely book of personal essays may not be everyone's cup of tea. A reader who likes a more linear style of writing may be frustrated with the many side paths that Cynthia Zarin explores before returning to what the reader thought was the author's main subject. This meandering--certainly conscious--is what I most liked about An Enlarged Heart. Zarin lets us know throughout that the seemingly peripheral--"There were things that could only be said by the way. (These were often the most important things.)"--are often the most meaningful, and that how we express and respond to these may say more about us than we think. She's a master of the parenthetical clause.
Zarin is also poet, and her writing reflects this:
This, and the title essay, about her daughter's sudden illness and Zarin's panicked response, are the best in the book, but each essay is worth savoring. And that's how I would suggest reading the book, taking time between pieces in order to give your taste buds enough time to take them in, slowly.
Zarin is also poet, and her writing reflects this:
My friend--of course--had no need of a compass. Set down anywhere on earth, he knew, like a bird or an animal, exactly where he was, and navigated faultlessly, finding, in a city he had been to exactly once, a decade ago, at night, the bar where his uncle, now dead, had bought him a beer. I, on the other hand, can be lost even in my own city, the city in which I was born and where, now, I live only three blocks from where I lived as a child. Coming up out of the subway I try to hold in my mind the direction in which I was traveling when I left the train car and every so often I have to ask a passerby to point me in the direction I should be going. I find this vaguely humiliating, and reproach myself with visions of intrepid Victorian travelers, leaving Portsmouth with only a satchel, on their way to serve as governesses to the children of the Raj.I suspect that some readers may find her style a bit precious or cloying; I was swept away by it. Here's an example, in an essay about the time she spent working at The New Yorker magazine, that may be both, depending on the reader. It's ONE sentence:
A number of years before, a writer affiliated with the magazine had made his way without touching the sidewalk from the office to the Chrysler building, six blocks away, through a series of catwalks, overpasses, and tunnels: in the lore of the magazine this was viewed as an enviable, even emblematic, achievement, as then a reigning idea behind the magazine itself, implicit in its character, which reflected on the life of its editor, was the primacy of secret routes and power of the inner life, which was viewed as an Escher landscape, with stairways that went nowhere, punctuated by moments of transcendence in which life, usually opaque, opened by means of a hidden switch.After this sentence, comes this one, which after the wandering style of the former, is like slamming into a brick wall: "In the lobby there was a tobacconist, a dry cleaner, and a luncheonette."
This, and the title essay, about her daughter's sudden illness and Zarin's panicked response, are the best in the book, but each essay is worth savoring. And that's how I would suggest reading the book, taking time between pieces in order to give your taste buds enough time to take them in, slowly.
September 7, 2017
I spent a day in bed with a virus . Such a crappy illness meds made me feel worse. I swear if it weren't for this book I'd never made it through with my sanity intact . I love the essays in this memoir. So damn beautiful it hurt when it ended.
June 5, 2013
I'm copying the review I put on Amazon.com:
It's hard to write this review, because I found Zarin's essays both intriguing and infuriating. She draws you in with the intimacy of a friend, the kind of friend you are quick to make as a mother in New York City, in the playgrounds or while working the rummage sale tables of your kid's school (in fact, I'm pretty sure I'm walking around wearing Zarin's cast-offs since I shop at The Cathedral School rummage sale!). She often goes into digressions and asks the reader "What's the point?" about something she just revealed--a comparison of the color of flowers out west and the color of water in Truro, for instance. However, I also fell in love with her voice, so human and humane, her ruminations on clothing, especially, were moving to me, as I can often best remember events of my youth by particular signature items of clothing. I felt a bit irritated by the references to husbands one and two, who never materialized as real people on the page, and "the children" seemed like a swarm of children, as if Zarin were a Pied Piper leading them about. As with the husbands, they did not have personalities, but I wondered, as a personal essayist myself, if this was out of a protective impulse toward privacy. Again, I'm conflicted, I loved the karmic sleight of hand she illuminates, especially in the title essay, in which she shows how past or present losses are offset by other, seemingly unrelated revelations or events. I love the indulgence of her prose, the willingness to give in to a fetish about a coat or a color, to say of her stretch of beach in Cape Cod, "This is the most beautiful beach in the world,"--this, from someone who admits she never strays too far from the perimeter of blocks in which she grew up. The seesawing back and forth between descriptions of her two apartments, sometimes confused me, but by the end of her book I felt that the essays, slightly overlapping, offered a palimpsest of a certain kind of New York City life, of an extremely intelligent and sensitive woman, who, like so many of us, are also unsure and full of self-doubt. I will dip back into it again.
It's hard to write this review, because I found Zarin's essays both intriguing and infuriating. She draws you in with the intimacy of a friend, the kind of friend you are quick to make as a mother in New York City, in the playgrounds or while working the rummage sale tables of your kid's school (in fact, I'm pretty sure I'm walking around wearing Zarin's cast-offs since I shop at The Cathedral School rummage sale!). She often goes into digressions and asks the reader "What's the point?" about something she just revealed--a comparison of the color of flowers out west and the color of water in Truro, for instance. However, I also fell in love with her voice, so human and humane, her ruminations on clothing, especially, were moving to me, as I can often best remember events of my youth by particular signature items of clothing. I felt a bit irritated by the references to husbands one and two, who never materialized as real people on the page, and "the children" seemed like a swarm of children, as if Zarin were a Pied Piper leading them about. As with the husbands, they did not have personalities, but I wondered, as a personal essayist myself, if this was out of a protective impulse toward privacy. Again, I'm conflicted, I loved the karmic sleight of hand she illuminates, especially in the title essay, in which she shows how past or present losses are offset by other, seemingly unrelated revelations or events. I love the indulgence of her prose, the willingness to give in to a fetish about a coat or a color, to say of her stretch of beach in Cape Cod, "This is the most beautiful beach in the world,"--this, from someone who admits she never strays too far from the perimeter of blocks in which she grew up. The seesawing back and forth between descriptions of her two apartments, sometimes confused me, but by the end of her book I felt that the essays, slightly overlapping, offered a palimpsest of a certain kind of New York City life, of an extremely intelligent and sensitive woman, who, like so many of us, are also unsure and full of self-doubt. I will dip back into it again.
April 24, 2013
It's really difficult to rate an author on the quality of their memoir, I think, because you end up essentially criticizing the experiences they had in life that they chose to write about. I suppose you could question why they chose at all to write the book, but you can't knock someone for attempting to tell their life story in a truthful manner. In this case, there's nothing that exciting that stands out as "Wow, you should have written a book about that" but, nevertheless, the writing is lyrical, deeply profound and illuminates many facets of the human condition, much like the poetry she's better known for.
My one teeny-tiny criticism involves the title story "An Enlarged Heart." It's about her young daughter's experience with a rare disease that makes her incredibly sick and prone to complications, namely, heart problems. Other than my initial reaction of "Why didn't she take her daughter to the hospital sooner instead of wasting time at home and at a doctor's office?" I was rendered speechless by Zarin's incredibly insensitive response to her daughter's roommate in the hospital, a disabled child.
Her arms hit out at nothing and her arms are oddly flaccid. Her ears are too big for her face, and the lobes are pointed. How terrible, I am thinking, to bear such a child.
Her sensitive rendering of her daughter's illness and the accompanying fears all parents have about the horror of their child's demise didn't really mesh with what seemed to be a harsh judgment of someone whose situation was unfixable and sad, not worthy of criticism.
Other passages are beautiful:
The houses I have known on the Cape are more elaborate: bigger, more entrenched in the dream of summer passed down from aunts and cousins, vested in the idea of permanence and perfection: the hurricane lamp; the curtain with its hokey pattern of seashells.
My one teeny-tiny criticism involves the title story "An Enlarged Heart." It's about her young daughter's experience with a rare disease that makes her incredibly sick and prone to complications, namely, heart problems. Other than my initial reaction of "Why didn't she take her daughter to the hospital sooner instead of wasting time at home and at a doctor's office?" I was rendered speechless by Zarin's incredibly insensitive response to her daughter's roommate in the hospital, a disabled child.
Her arms hit out at nothing and her arms are oddly flaccid. Her ears are too big for her face, and the lobes are pointed. How terrible, I am thinking, to bear such a child.
Her sensitive rendering of her daughter's illness and the accompanying fears all parents have about the horror of their child's demise didn't really mesh with what seemed to be a harsh judgment of someone whose situation was unfixable and sad, not worthy of criticism.
Other passages are beautiful:
The houses I have known on the Cape are more elaborate: bigger, more entrenched in the dream of summer passed down from aunts and cousins, vested in the idea of permanence and perfection: the hurricane lamp; the curtain with its hokey pattern of seashells.
February 19, 2013
Zarin's essays are lyrical and dreamy, almost reading like missives from a lost world. People, places, things appear and reappear in these essays, which are, ultimately, about love. A poet, Zarin has also written children's books - may well be worth looking into them.
February 27, 2013
"I imagined that someday I too would do good work, crouching in mud, and bestowing beneficence. I had no idea that I was entirely unsuited to selflessness."
February 4, 2025
A gem of a book. Memoir of a writer and New York mum. Her experiences make the New York of the 1970s and 1980s, before terror, both personal and emblematic of community life. Her descriptions of coats and curtains explode with colours and textures. Beach holidays are both mundane and filled with parental anxieties. The account of her daughter's severe illness reads like a thriller. I loved this book.
February 20, 2024
Well written, but the disjointedness was off-putting. A Radcliff graduate, she was representstive of wealthy New Yorkers who enlisted tailors to rescue garments rather than buy new, rhapsodized over old coats, dished the dirt about people she worked with & only obliquely referred to men she loved (or not) who fathered her children.
Time could have been better spent with another book
Time could have been better spent with another book
August 14, 2021
a couple of the essays in this book were really really good and the prose is very poetic. the other essays were just not SUPER great to me personally and also felt very out of touch with reality if that makes sense.
April 18, 2022
A sweet, poetic memoir that felt like a Saturday brunch with an acquaintance that goes on for a bit too long and you spend the rest of your afternoon a bit tipsy, a bit tired, and feeling really unproductive.
April 10, 2014
A number of images and moments recur in more than one of the twelve chapters that make up this memoir: a film with a scene in which an actress wears yellow stockings, snowflakes on the collar of a violet coat, a tube of red lipstick found in a different coat pocket, a bathroom with a skylight over the tub, an apartment with layers of paint that the author idly picked off. That last image, peeling off chips of paint with a fingernail, getting to what's underneath, and underneath that, and underneath that, seems tied to what this book is doing more generally: looking at the past, and also looking at what's under the surface of things. Zarin's writing, which is graceful, full of commas and long sentences, captures a lot of things extremely well: New York moments (mostly from decades ago: apartments and tailors and furriers and restaurants), scenes from travel (including a trip to a coastal town in Italy and trips to Cape Cod), and (maybe best of all) the way life unfurls, the way we move through it knowing some things about ourselves or where we're going and missing or misjudging others, and the way we reflect on it all. In the book's first chapter, Zarin writes: "When we first acquire what will become our memories, we do not recognize them or know how and when we will go back to them or what they will mean" (17). Zarin's tone reminds me, sometimes, of André Aciman, another writer who I think is brilliant at this kind of exploration of the paths that take us to where we end up, and who I think has a similar way of drawing the reader's attention to the sameness/difference of a person over time: the writing self, the past self.
Some sentences I really liked:
Some sentences I really liked:
Each evening as dusk inked in first the lintels of the doorways and then the alleyways between the buildings, the fountain was circled by swallows, who rose like smoke signals over the jet of water that arced from the dragon's mouth: a dragon who put out his own fire. (28)
I found myself thinking, wildly, for a moment, that we could not get home because we were stuck in time—there was no way to get from the cool glade of that pool, and the waiter and the silver domes, and the toothpicks, to the next place we were meant to be, meeting her brother at a pizza place, in West Harlem, where we live. (123)
A number of years before, a writer affiliated with the magazine had made his way without touching the sidewalk from the office to the Chrysler Building, six blocks away, through a series of catwalks, overpasses, and tunnels: in the lore of the magazine this was viewed as an enviable, even emblematic, achievement, as then a reigning idea behind the magazine itself, implicit in its character, which reflected the life of its editor, was the primacy of secret routes and the power of the inner life, which was viewed as an Escher landscape, with stairways that went nowhere, punctuated by moments of transcendence in which life, usually opaque, opened by means of a hidden switch. (172-173)
And I thought of the story I had read so long ago, in which the story the characters were reading was the story they had asked for, scribbling themselves into a book that they read aloud to themselves as it happened. (219)
February 18, 2025
First of all, this book broke my string of bad "Currently Reading" luck: For several years now, any book I mark as "currently reading" invariably goes unfinished.
Second: I just love Cynthia Zarin's beautiful writing and can't believe I didn't find it earlier. I did read her New Yorker profile of Madeleine l'Engle several years ago (though not when it was written -- I was the age of Zarin's children, who appear in the article, then). On my first read, I (naturally) paid more attention to l'Engle's life than to Zarin's prose.
But when I reread the profile the other day, I found myself reading past l'Engle's life, and noticing Zarin's beautiful observations instead. They were embedded neatly and naturally within the piece, and I wanted more.
While I'm giving this a 5 (simply because I think Zarin is SOO talented, and because the ending of "September" literally made my jaw fall open), I think this essay collection would have benefited from greater oversight -- the kind l'Engle's profile surely received. The prose was often TOO fine and TOO beautiful. (Sometimes I wanted a break from the clever sentences.)
Also, Zarin has this very literary habit of being cagey about identifiers, and obsessed with recollections-within-recollections (same tho), so I kept thinking: wait, WHICH coat? WHICH house? WHICH trip? And I'd have to page back.
Overall, I just love her writing and can't wait to dive into more. I felt inspired as a writer, myself, while reading it: It made me rush to my journal. (One of the best indicators of good writing, for me at least.)
Second: I just love Cynthia Zarin's beautiful writing and can't believe I didn't find it earlier. I did read her New Yorker profile of Madeleine l'Engle several years ago (though not when it was written -- I was the age of Zarin's children, who appear in the article, then). On my first read, I (naturally) paid more attention to l'Engle's life than to Zarin's prose.
But when I reread the profile the other day, I found myself reading past l'Engle's life, and noticing Zarin's beautiful observations instead. They were embedded neatly and naturally within the piece, and I wanted more.
While I'm giving this a 5 (simply because I think Zarin is SOO talented, and because the ending of "September" literally made my jaw fall open), I think this essay collection would have benefited from greater oversight -- the kind l'Engle's profile surely received. The prose was often TOO fine and TOO beautiful. (Sometimes I wanted a break from the clever sentences.)
Also, Zarin has this very literary habit of being cagey about identifiers, and obsessed with recollections-within-recollections (same tho), so I kept thinking: wait, WHICH coat? WHICH house? WHICH trip? And I'd have to page back.
Overall, I just love her writing and can't wait to dive into more. I felt inspired as a writer, myself, while reading it: It made me rush to my journal. (One of the best indicators of good writing, for me at least.)
Read
June 11, 2014http://www.full-stop.net/2013/02/13/r...
Review by Lindsay Gellman
ed. note:
The reviewer has a personal relationship with Cynthia Zarin.
The reviewer was Zarin’s student and advisee at Yale in the spring of 2012.
As that semester began, Zarin was concerned that the reviewer had only taken writing courses with a single instructor to date. So Zarin enrolled the reviewer in her own non-fiction writing course, without leaving the reviewer much choice.
Zarin said the reviewer should not have “only one voice” in her head as she wrote; Zarin’s voice is now in the reviewer’s head, too.
The reviewer attended a gathering of classmates in Yale’s Writing Concentration Program, which Zarin coordinates. At the meeting, Zarin urged the students, nearly all of whom hope to be professional writers, to avoid careers in writing at all costs.
The reviewer found this depressing.
Nevertheless, the reviewer paid frequent visits to Zarin’s office. Mostly, Zarin told the reviewer to “condense” her writing. When the reviewer protested that it was already condensed, Zarin said to “condense some more.”
But there were other conversations: Zarin knows the reviewer’s longings and fears.
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2013/02/13/r...
Review by Lindsay Gellman
ed. note:
The reviewer has a personal relationship with Cynthia Zarin.
The reviewer was Zarin’s student and advisee at Yale in the spring of 2012.
As that semester began, Zarin was concerned that the reviewer had only taken writing courses with a single instructor to date. So Zarin enrolled the reviewer in her own non-fiction writing course, without leaving the reviewer much choice.
Zarin said the reviewer should not have “only one voice” in her head as she wrote; Zarin’s voice is now in the reviewer’s head, too.
The reviewer attended a gathering of classmates in Yale’s Writing Concentration Program, which Zarin coordinates. At the meeting, Zarin urged the students, nearly all of whom hope to be professional writers, to avoid careers in writing at all costs.
The reviewer found this depressing.
Nevertheless, the reviewer paid frequent visits to Zarin’s office. Mostly, Zarin told the reviewer to “condense” her writing. When the reviewer protested that it was already condensed, Zarin said to “condense some more.”
But there were other conversations: Zarin knows the reviewer’s longings and fears.
Read more here: http://www.full-stop.net/2013/02/13/r...
October 21, 2013
Hmmm? Not sure about what I think about Zarin's writing.
I like it---but its sort of like free associating.
I was uncomfortable and somewhat judgemental about her and her lifestyle at first.
But, I started to really "get" her.
For instance, her chapter, "Coats" seems sort of silly at first but then becomes a really interesting and unique way to talk about her life---using the coats as a centerpiece.
I like her writing, once I got the hang of it.
I like it---but its sort of like free associating.
I was uncomfortable and somewhat judgemental about her and her lifestyle at first.
But, I started to really "get" her.
For instance, her chapter, "Coats" seems sort of silly at first but then becomes a really interesting and unique way to talk about her life---using the coats as a centerpiece.
I like her writing, once I got the hang of it.
March 12, 2013
Zarin is a poet by profession and writes for THE NEW YORKER. This is a collection of biographical essays that were great fun to read. I especially enjoyed the last essay about her start at The New Yorker.
September 13, 2015
2-3 stars
The language and the style drew to the book but over half way through I started to lose interest. It felt so flat. Maybe I was missing something. I really wanted to like this book but I just kept losing my focus over and over again.
The language and the style drew to the book but over half way through I started to lose interest. It felt so flat. Maybe I was missing something. I really wanted to like this book but I just kept losing my focus over and over again.
August 6, 2014
Beautifully crafted. Ms. Zarin has a way with words. Sometimes the stream of consciousness writing made me feel like I was with one of my chatty friends. Other times I wanted her to get to the point.
This does make me want to visit New York City and buy beautiful coats.
This does make me want to visit New York City and buy beautiful coats.
June 27, 2013
The writing was gorgeous - but I skimmed the book. Not a huge nonfiction fan - without a plot I have a hard time paying attention! Really beautiful prose.
March 13, 2014
A rich and wonderful collection of memoirs, an exploration of the colossal in the mundane. Bolstered by lustrous prose, it has the feel of an all expansive work of fiction.
Read
July 16, 2014This is an important book. NYer writer, Cape Cod, mothering, longing, and coats. A lot of coats.
May 30, 2013
Beautiful and wise.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews