THE HEART-SHAPED TIN

A collection of short essays about how kitchen objects carry our grief.

For her wedding, journalist and author Wilson baked a “rich, dark fruit cake” in a “heart-shaped tin.” Two decades later, the tin unexpectedly fell at her feet, tumbling out of the drawer where she stored it because it was too large for her kitchen cupboards. The timing of the fall felt like an eerie coincidence: Months before, her husband ended their marriage when he left her “out of the blue, for another woman. It felt like a sign.” The tin, Wilson realizes, is just one of the many kitchen objects that she associates with loss. There is, for example, the toast rack her mother loved before dementia robbed her of her memories and, eventually, her life. In the process of cataloging her losses, Wilson notices the emotions others attach to their own kitchen objects during times of grief and mourning. From the “tenacious and brave” Ukrainian cupboard that stubbornly clings to a building wall despite a Russian “bombardment,” to a friend’s pasta bowl that symbolizes his struggle with hoarding, to the disposable paper coffee cups that ushered in the age of overconsumption, Wilson is fascinated by how people imbue objects with meanings that symbolize their greatest losses and most intense grief. The strongest essays in this collection are about the author’s own experiences as a divorcée on the precipice of her mother’s death; each of those narratives moves through a morass of loss with quiet, lyrical dignity. By contrast, the essays most removed from her life—and, in particular, the ones about social phenomena like paper coffee cups—tend to drag, their pace burdened with research rather than buoyed with emotion and reflection.

A memoir in essays about the emotional power of objects in times of mourning.