It is often that with the adoration and love you feel for your favorite writers, you might wish you knew them personally. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a cup of coffee with them and shoot the breeze about life and all its little annoyances and wonders? Sure. That’s the mark of a very effective writer --- making you want to know them. In actuality, of course, there is no guarantee that you would meet them and they would live up to your standards. They are just people, of course, and their work is only one small part of who they are. There is only so much that a writer can put on a page that comes ripped from the very fiber of their beings, right? Well, maybe not. Jennifer Weiner’s first collection of essays, HUNGRY HEART: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing, gives us what I assume is the extent of her honesty and full heart. There is a truly insightful and experienced voice here, and it’s all Weiner.

Becoming a bestselling novelist is not a way to undo a lifetime full of disappointment and difficulty. And although Weiner’s issues are decidedly first world ones, she clearly explores her pain and sorrows in a funny and non-exploitive tone that will win her a new bevy of followers.

"HUNGRY HEART is a serious, funny and admirable look into one writer’s heart and soul, opening up some of the deeper places that her work comes from and sharing it all with readers who will appreciate her warmth, humor and, especially, candor."

Life as a plus-size girl in contemporary America is the main struggle for Weiner in all of her exploits. Her not being a supermodel seems to claim a lot of time and energy in her dealings with herself, her family and others. Feeling like a constant outsider (“a Lane Bryant outtake in an Abercrombie & Fitch world”), Weiner is able to infiltrate the dark underside of our culture as it relates to her own misadventures in both youth and adulthood. Her unforgiving, difficult and angry father, her lonely adolescence, a mom who discovers her true sexuality much later in life, relationships good and bad, an internet battle few other writers of her standing have had to wage in the public eye --- these are all important and compelling topics in this set of essays. However, it is the utter stripped-bare honesty of her miscarriage in a very late chapter in the book that will haunt you when you shut its covers.

The graphic description might seem extreme to some, but the pain, horror and disappointment of this lost pregnancy, coupled with the fact that it belongs to a happy second marriage when she’s older and with a man who hasn’t been a dad before, is a remarkable achievement. Similar to the difficult and emotional memoirs of Joan Didion at the time of her husband’s and daughter’s deaths, this chapter in HUNGRY HEART stands alone as a testament to the quiet strength and rigor of Weiner’s prose. Her work is often relegated to the “chick lit” arena and denigrated as such, but if this kind of honesty is indicative of why people love her work so much, then she should be remarkably proud of what she has accomplished. It is this kind of exploration of the most dire aspects of one’s life that raises the level of their status in the world of literature and makes them important, regardless of how many books they sell.

HUNGRY HEART is a serious, funny and admirable look into one writer’s heart and soul, opening up some of the deeper places that her work comes from and sharing it all with readers who will appreciate her warmth, humor and, especially, candor. Weiner has fashioned a tell-all that goes down easily and nourishes slowly and fully. It is a meal to be savored until she writes another story that looks into women’s lives with the most honest insight.