Kay Hudson

Jennifer Weiner’s Hungry Heart carries the subtitle Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing, which pretty much describes the scope of the book, composed of memoir, essays, and a few articles from Weiner’s career as a journalist. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I picked it up in the writing section at Half Price Books, thanks to the subtitle, but it’s not a writing craft book at all. The sections about Weiner’s writing career are interesting, but the tales of her life and family are even better. Weiner has fought her weight all her life, but if you’ve felt like an outsider for any reason, you’ll identify with her. I’ve read several of her novels, and reading this sent me out to pick up a couple more, including her first, Good In Bed, now that I know how she came to write it (and the stunning advance she got for it, something pretty much unheard of in the current publishing market).

.

Weiner is, as she says, a “proud and happy writer of popular fiction.” She is also something of a campaigner for gender equality in, say, the New York Times, meaning that women writers, and the fields they dominate, deserve equal treatment by reviewers, and she addresses those topics in the book.

.

She also discusses her family: her ill-matched parents, her wandering and sometimes abusive father, her mother who came out as a Lesbian in her fifties, and her quirky siblings. “It is a truth universally acknowledged among writers,” she says, “that an unhappy childhood is the greatest gift a parent can provide.” I’m not sure I’d take that literally—I had a happy childhood with parents who were voracious readers and taught me to love books—but I have to agree that our childhood traumas, large and small, follow us through life. Weiner has built a successful career as a novelist on her own experiences, and it’s fascinating to look behind the pages at her adventures.