What a Broken Heart Can Do (Finding Hope and Healing in Difficult Times)

From the critically-acclaimed author of Shoutin’ in the Fire, a journey through American heartbreak and healing, in the spirit of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This and books by Rebecca Solnit.

Heartbreak is, perhaps, one of the most universal human experiences. Whether precipitated by loss, love, disappointment, failure, or fear–each of us moves through the world with cracks in the center of our chests, until they become so overwhelming that we don’t know anything else. Today in America, heartbreak feels inescapable. But what if, those cracks are not our end, but our beginning?

In What a Broken Heart Can Do, we follow Danté Stewart as he travels the country in a quest to construct the modern American heartbeat: a mosaic of a muscle, built from trauma and triumph, pain and peace. Along the way, we encounter the chaos of an occupied Minnesota; the haunting echoes of the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church; the rebuilding of Uvalde, Texas; the legacies of The Great Migration; the expectations and ghosts of his South Carolina hometown; the ravages of COVID; and the journeys of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.

In the vein of timely and timeless examinations of our modern life--Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed, Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, and Heather Cox Richardson’s Notes from an American, What a Broken Heart Can Do is an intimate portrait of how broken hearts bear witness to larger stories of family, failure, and country; what we learn together about what we can become when our broken hearts remain open, and when we bring our broken hearts together in community. Heartbreak is not an interruption of the life we were meant to live. It is the material that our lives are made of. The question for us is not how to avoid it or even recover from it. It is what we do with it while we’re still inside of it that helps us endure.