Echoes of Heartsounds

September 1, 2014
In her latest, first-rate memoir, Lear (Where Did I Leave My Glasses?, 2008) notes, You cannot describe rapture. But she does a does a pretty good job of describing her life's highsmeeting and falling in love with two husbands; and lowslosing her first husband, Hal, and succumbing to a not major, not minor heart attack followed by a bumpy recovery. Along with her honest-to-a-fault account of the incident, medical intervention, and recuperation, she inserts time-travel episodes back to Hal's illness. These are triggered by the fact that, as fickle luck would have it, Martha's illness has her walking the same hallways, occupying the same hospital, seeing the same doctors she did decades ago with Hal. She is afraid that a whole great tsunami of memories, will rise up and drown out my present. It nearly does. She recounts the various forms of pain she endures with her inimitable style and candor. Readers moved by this narrative will likely want to catch up with Lear, and her fans will surely want to pick this up, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)