Review: Hungry Heart

Jennifer Weiner has long been a favourite author of mine. I was able to see her when she was in Toronto a few years back and she was so nice and real. Because I find her to be an overall excellent human, I was so excited to read Hungry Heart, Weiner’s first non-fiction book.

Here’s the description of her book of essays:

Jennifer Weiner is many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and an “unlikely feminist enforcer” (The New Yorker). She’s also a mom, a daughter, and a sister; a former rower and current cyclist; a best friend and a reality TV junkie. In her first foray into nonfiction, she takes the raw stuff of her personal life and spins into a collection of essays on modern womanhood as uproariously funny and moving as the best of Tina Fey, Fran Lebowitz, and Nora Ephron.
Jennifer grew up as an outsider in her picturesque Connecticut hometown (“a Lane Bryant outtake in an Abercrombie & Fitch photo shoot”) and at her Ivy League college, but finally found her people in newsrooms in central Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, and her voice as a novelist, activist, and New York Times columnist.
No subject is off-limits in this intimate and honest essay collection: sex, weight, envy, money, her mom’s newfound lesbianism, and her estranged father’s death. From lonely adolescence to modern childbirth to hearing her six-year-old daughter’s use of the f-word—fat­­—for the first time, Jennifer Weiner goes there, with the wit and candor that have endeared her to readers all over the world.
By turns hilarious and deeply touching, this collection shows that the woman behind treasured novels like Good in Bed and Best Friends Forever is every bit as winning, smart, and honest in real life as she is in her fiction.

I’ve met a few authors who just don’t give off an accessible sort of vibe but Weiner is so genuine. That personality comes through in the book and you really feel like she's just chatting with you and telling you, and only you, her stories. 

Side note: if you watch The Bachelor(ette), make sure you follow Weiner on Twitter. I'm guilty of hate-watching the show (though I've skipped the current season...Nick drove me bonkers so I couldn't bring myself to watch it) and I find that many of the things my friends and I are thinking and saying are what Weiner is tweeting. Funny, insightful, and sometimes cringe-worthy, they're definitely a must for any fan (or "fan") of the franchise. 

I love how passionate Weiner is about feminism and, in particular, discussing and bringing attention to inequality with book reviews. The issue is, basically, if you look at any major publications that review books, you'll see that women authors just aren’t getting reviewed as often. And when they are, it's not usually for commercial fiction but, meanwhile, genre fiction for men is often reviewed. I think I was expecting even more about this issue in the book and was a little let down that she didn't tackle it as much as I thought she might. She has written other articles about the issue so I encourage you to look them up.

When I finished Hungry Heart, I found I wanted more. I imagine Weiner had many more stories to share but only so many could make it into the book, which is too bad. So many stories, so few pages to share them in. I guess I'm just greedy!

I also wish there had been more present day stories and anecdotes. I loved finding out what Weiner's childhood was like and how it shaped her as a woman and an author but I found I wanted to know more about how she's living her life now and what she thinks of even more current events.

If you're a fan of Jennifer Weiner's novels, you're going to want to read Hungry Heart. If you like memoirs and books of essays by smart, funny women, you're going to want to read it. I hope she writes another series of essays soon. In the meantime, I'll impatiently wait for her next novel.

*An ARC of this book was provided by the publisher, in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*