Echoes of Heartsounds: A Memoir of Healing

Martha Weinman Lear

Sep 2014 · Open Road Media

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This New York Times–bestselling author’s memoir of her own heart attack is “a refresher course in handling life’s meanest challenges with grace” (Library Journal).

It begins late one afternoon in her kitchen. There is no collapse, no massive pain. Just a slight fluttering sensation in her chest, then chills, and finally, nausea. Probably nothing to worry about, the doctor assures her on the phone. It doesn’t sound like a heart attack.

But it is. Heart attacks in women can look and feel dramatically different than they do in men, which is why they often go undiagnosed. But heart disease is the number-one killer of American women—greater than all forms of cancer combined.

When the doctor examines Lear the day after her episode, the verdict is shocking. So begins an account, filled with grace, humor, and ferocity, of her hard-won return to good health, beset by mysterious postsurgical complications and haunted by memories of her late husband when she finds herself in the same coronary unit in which she lost him all those years ago.

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Martha Weinman Lear is the author of Where Did I Leave My Glasses? as well as the bestsellers The Child Worshipers and Heartsounds, which became a Peabody Award­–winning film. She is a former articles editor and staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and has written extensively for that and many other national publications, including AARP The Magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, GQ, House Beautiful, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, Woman’s Day, McCall’s, Family Circle, and Reader’s Digest, often on medical, cultural, and sociological subjects. She lives in New York City with her husband, screenwriter Albert Ruben.