Weekly Read: “I Must Have Been That Man” by Adina Talve-Goodman
BLR’s Weekly Read brings you one outstanding story, poem, or essay from our archive. This week’s read is “I Must Have Been That Man” by Adina Talve-Goodman, winner of BLR‘s 2015 Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction.
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On a Monday night in October when I was twenty, I walked home with a boy from a party drinking cheap whiskey and sharing puffs of his cigarette. We stopped on the stairs outside of my apartment and kissed. I asked if he wanted to spend the night. This is healthy, I told myself, this is college.
In my room, we laughed and shushed each other, fumbling around with buttons and zippers until he took off my shirt.
“What’s this,” he said as he traced the scar down the middle of my chest, his fingers lingering on the keloids, the small, hardened lumps of scar tissue that punctuated the already prominent pink line.
“I had a heart transplant,” I said.
“When?”
“A year ago.”
“Oh.”
I waited for him to ask the usual questions: why did you need it, are you okay now, what about the donor.
“You have great boobs,” he said.
Why this essay?
“Reading this essay, I was struck by Talve-Goodman’s vulnerability and empathy, and by how she describes both estrangement from and identification with her “suffering.” As I was reading the description of her heartbeat, my next-door neighbor started playing a song with a strong 1-2 rhythm,
heavier on the downbeat: ba-bum ba-bum ba-bum. It was a strange moment of synchronicity, where the words on the page seemed to spill out into my actual life.”
– Sophie Griffin, BLR intern
More from Adina
Adina Talve-Goodman (1986–2018) was born in St. Louis with a congenital heart condition and underwent a heart transplant at age nineteen. She graduated from Washington University and performed internationally at the Academia dell’Arte in Italy and Globe Theater in London. Adina was a mentor for Girls Write Now and the managing editor of One Story. She was recognized with the Hadassah Advocacy Award and BLR‘s Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction. Adina was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma while she was attending
the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program and working on what would become her debut collection of essays, Your Hearts, Your Scars (Bellevue Literary Press). Learn more about Adina and the book on her website.
The Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship
The Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship is a year-long mentorship on the craft of fiction writing with One Story magazine. The goal is to give an early-career writer a boost in their career, in honor of Adina’s memory. Applications are open until October 8, 2025. Learn more.