Adina Talve Goodman’s "Your Hearts, Your Scars" Tells Us It's Human to Love and Hate Our Scars

By Melissa Lauer 

Adina Talve Goodman’s Your Hearts, Your Scars, is a frank, incisively charismatic text. The book was published posthumously and consists of seven essays that trace the varied, complicated shapes of what it means to live with chronic illness—in Talve Goodman’s case, a congenital heart defect—to receive an organ transplant, and to begin the messy, piecemeal process of recovery.

Loved ones and colleagues compiled the book from Talve Goodman’s finished works and written fragments after her unexpected death in 2018. As such, the book also contains some of their memories and contextual details regarding the process of creating the text, but the core essays hold the real gravity of the work, the mind of the writer preserved on the page. 

While chronic illness and Talve Goodman’s experience of needing, then receiving, a heart transplant as a teenager form the premise of the book, it doesn’t read like traditional memoir. Instead, these are true personal essays, connected by core experiences but most interested in examining the themes, ideas, and insights within rather than developing a straightforward chronological narrative. 

The book itself feels like a brief, intense encounter with another mind and another body—that’s how acutely present Talve Goodman’s physicality is on the page as she examines her life, near death, and moments of connection with other people. These figures range from a boyfriend (who knew her through her transplant) to a man who married a woman dying of heart failure, a man who has fallen from his electric wheelchair to a would-be lover who describes her post-transplant existence as zombielike. 

The core themes of the book emerge through these encounters: ideas of waiting, identity, and existence in a contradictory body; questions of what is owed or demanded of illness, of recovery.

For me, these are also personal questions. Though I don’t share Talve Goodman’s diagnoses, most of my immediate family and I live with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, a chronic condition that affects  our joints. 

My older sister has suffered from severe, disabling symptoms since adolescence, and I’ve often helped to care for her then and in the years since. It’s common for me to approach narratives that orbit illness with that personal lens; less common for their insights to feel close to me.

Closeness leaps off the page in the opening essay, “I Must Have Been That Man.” Talve Goodman describes a story her parents, both rabbis, told her as she faced her heart transplant. In the story,  a rabbi asks three sick men the same question: “Is your suffering dear to you?” 

Talve Goodman elaborates, “I took it to mean this: When the time comes, will you be able to live without the heart defect that always made you feel special and strong? Will you be able to face wellness and normalcy?” At first, her instinct is to reject the question, to refute that she might hold her suffering close in this way, but by the end of the piece she states simply, “Is your suffering dear to you? Yes. A little bit, yes.” 

There are a thousand taboos surrounding illness, and at least as many around caretaking. But the truth of both experiences is that they demand a level of suffering, even while the dynamic of sick person/caregiver culturally champions ideas of sacrifice, martyrdom, and recovery. 

In discussing the experience of suffering, and the draw of that pain even for the sufferer, Talve Goodman begins to take those barriers apart, piece by piece. As I read Goodman’s book, I thought about my sister; the levels on which her condition must necessarily be a part of who she is, how she acts and expresses herself, and I thought of myself—the insidious resentments that lurk in my experience of caregiving, and also the indescribable comfort of being needed by another person. This book is the first place I had seen a direct acceptance that suffering is—maybe must be—in some way precious to us. 

There is a shamefulness to this acknowledgement—that itchy insistence that no one should value the thing that hurts them, victimizes them, and  makes them other, but Talve Goodman voices the reality of this split experience with the kind of direct simplicity that sidesteps taboo. This is real, she tells us, and it’s okay. It’s human to be ill and well and in-between—it’s human to love and hate our scars. 

There are empty places in the book as well: clear repetitions, meditations that are pulled up short, as well as unfinished explorations of theory and history. These gaps are a legacy of the text’s creation, assembled from drafts or fragments with as little alteration as possible. The ultimate effect is a book still—and always—in process. There is a richness to this result, an insistence on maintaining the available posthumous text that intentionally, and successfully, champions Talve Goodman’s own voice. 

Yet these gaps also highlight the loss that the book emerges from, that any reader must sense, even without the careful words of friends, family, and colleagues that frame Talve Goodman’s essays. 

The mind at work in these pages is sharp and funny, stitching together the kind of revelations that feel obvious only when seen in text, when the sentences click into that place inside a reader that says, true. It is the feeling of understanding that comes from seeing someone else put into words a knowledge you already hold silently inside yourself, unlanguaged. So the shadow of incompleteness forms its own statement of loss, an outline of how Talve Goodman might have built this book—and others to come—given more time.

In a short, sharp moment of analysis in the book’s final essay, Talve Goodman teases apart the language of recovery, writing of a nurse who describes her as “so pretty, she didn’t think I was a patient.” Talve Goodman continues, “The truth is, we don’t really have a word to describe a woman who comes through something a lot like death and remains light. We don’t have it for boys either, so we say strong for them. We say pretty when we mean you look a lot like life.” Your Hearts, Your Scars writes into and beyond such gaps—in language, life, and understanding—even while its own text is unavoidably incomplete. 

The essays work to give language to the unworded, offer complexity to each mind encountered and space to each story, while building their own web of experience, emotion, and investigation. And in the end this book, too, looks very much like life.