What’s Rachel reading? Hungry Heart by Jennifer Weiner

I’ve always been an unrepentant reader, reading early, quickly, and indiscriminately: Books, magazines, cereal boxes, road signs, encyclopedia entries, restaurant menus — anything that could be read, I read it. One of my mom’s favorite stories to tell of a much younger Rachel is of our weekly trips to the public library, after which I’d generally stall out with an open book halfway up the stairs on the landing of our split-level house and force everyone to step over me while hauling up the rest of the books and groceries.

I remained a fairly indiscriminate reader well into my teen years, working my way through the children’s section, tiny “young adult section,” and then a good portion of the adult section in our small local library. While I of course had my favorite titles on repeat, this early and broad (for the time) exposure to books and reading eventually helped propel me into a career as a librarian — and left me with a deep and abiding love for libraries. Yes, I appreciate the programs and the technology and the databases and the resources, but at its core, it’s always been the books for me.

In Hungry Heart, Weiner talks candidly about what it means for her and other writers of popular women’s fiction to be pigeonholed as “chick lit,” and so much more. I loved the first half of the book, and not just because so many of my childhood experiences roughly parallel hers (growing up Jewish in a mostly non-Jewish community without the kind of resources or know-how to buy the “right” clothes and shoes or act right to fit in). Jennifer Weiner knows how to tell a story, including the story of her own life. Plus: She’s darn funny!

The second half of Hungry Heart, however, started to stutter a bit for me. As she moves into the more current story of her life, the essays become a little more disjointed and uneven — while she’s still telling smaller stories, and telling them well, they don’t come together as smoothly into a coherent larger narrative and aren’t always as relatable. It feels as if in parts she’s being less honest, and distracting from the overall tale with less-relevant sidebars. It’s probably more difficult to talk about more recent events without the distance that time brings, but the second part of the book could have benefited from some tighter editing and a closer look as to what fits, what doesn’t.

That’s not to say that the second half was bad, however — I think it’s more that my expectations were built up so high from the fantastically gripping beginning. So if you’re a Jennifer Weiner fan, a chick lit fan, or a reader of memoirs, I highly recommend Hungry Heart. Weiner lays out the experiences that shaped her into the storyteller she is today, delving honestly into everything from abandonment to body image to how she became a writer. Her memoir brims with the same trademark humor, intelligence, and warmth as her bestselling novels, and after reading it I feel as if she could be my new best friend. (Or at least: I’m now following her on twitter.)

When I go back to the library this weekend I’m also going to check out the DVD of In Her Shoes. Weiner talks in her memoir about how the book was optioned into a movie, and how although it was a flop at the box office it gained traction later. I’ve never seen it but now am intrigued, and alas, it’s not available on Prime or Netflix.

What are you reading this week?

What have you been reading lately? Tell us about it! 🙂