Hungry heart

Jennifer Weiner turns to her own life in a collection of personal essays on womanhood. It is her first work of nonfiction. She writes as a mother, daughter, sister, runner and former rower, and as someone who watches a lot of reality TV.

She grew up feeling like an outsider in her Connecticut hometown, and again at her Ivy League college. She describes herself in those years as a plus-size girl in a world of slim, polished classmates. She found her people in newsrooms in central Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, and there she found her voice. That voice later carried her into novels, activism and a column at the New York Times.

The essays hold nothing back. Subjects include sex, weight, envy and money, her mother coming out as a lesbian later in life, and the death of her estranged father. Other pieces cover a lonely adolescence, modern childbirth, and the moment her six-year-old daughter says the word fat for the first time.

The tone is a personal memoir in essay form, candid and funny, with moving passages throughout. It sits in the line of comic women essayists. Readers get a woman's account of wanting, losing and loving, and of finding her place as a storyteller.