Your Hearts, Your Scars

Engaging, funny, and unflinching essays about coming of age as a transplant patient and living each day as a gift

Adina Talve-Goodman was born with a congenital heart condition and survived multiple operations over the course of her childhood, including a heart transplant at age nineteen. In these seven essays, she tells the story of her chronic illness and her youthful search for love and meaning, never forgetting that her adult life is tied to the loss of another person--the donor of her transplanted heart.

Whether writing about the experience of taking her old heart home from the hospital (and passing it around the Thanksgiving table), a summer camp for young transplant patients, or a memorable night on the town, Talve-Goodman’s writing is filled with curiosity, humor, and compassion. Published posthumously, Your Hearts, Your Scars is the work of a writer wise beyond her years, a moving reflection on chance and gratitude, and a testament to hope and kindness.

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 became a mentor for Girls Write Now and the managing editor of celebrated literary magazine One Story, and she 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 Iowa Writers’ Workshop and working on what would become her debut collection of essays Your Hearts, Your Scars (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in January 2023).