Your Hearts, Your Scars

Adina Talve-Goodman (1986–2018) was born in St. Louis with a congenital heart condition and underwent a heart transplant at age nineteen. She went on to graduate from Washington University, and perform internationally at the Academia dell’Arte in Italy and Globe Theater in London. She later become a mentor for Girls Write Now and the managing editor of celebrated literary magazine One Story, and was recognized with the Hadassah Advocacy Award and Bellevue Literary Review Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction. She was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, caused by post-transplant immunosuppressants, as she was attending the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and working on what would become her debut collection of essays Your Hearts, Your Scars.

Wingate Prize ShortlistReading Group Choices “Top Picks” selectionJewish Women’s Archive Book Club PickShelf Unbound “Recommended Reading” selectionHadassah Magazine “Reading List” selectionBook Riot “New Releases” selection“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