Cynthia Zarin, author of three books of poetry and several books for children, has written an excellent, sometimes dreamy “personal history” called "An Enlarged Heart." One of Zarin’s books for kids is called "What Do You See When You Shut Your Eyes?", and that could just as well be the title of this memoir. Zarin's way of calling up memories and meaningful images is akin to the way unexpected thoughts arrive at the front of our minds when we’re able to shut out the world.

What do we see in "An Enlarged Heart"? The yellow tights on a character in a decades-old movie, an unattended airborne umbrella landing in a tree, unmelted snowflakes sticking to a coat in a cold apartment. These images are brought to vivid life and linger long after you've closed the book.

But they’re not just stand-alone images. Carefully chosen, they help Zarin tell her life story in snippets, as anecdotes overlap, one remembrance brings up another, and memories intersect. The yellow tights on Glenda Jackson (were they in Sunday Bloody Sunday or Women in Love?) are Zarin’s jumping-off point for the subject of memory itself. The floating umbrella, which lands in a neighbor’s backyard tree, show what strange little occurrences are sometimes needed to connect us to our neighbors. And the frozen snowflakes on the coat, even as its wearer comes into Zarin’s apartment, will be familiar to any New Yorker who’s lived in a drafty apartment. (Which is to say, any New Yorker.)

The coat those snowflakes rest on is important to Zarin. As she explains in the chapter “Coats,” she has strong attachments to the coats that have passed through her life. With the effortless style that is typical of her book, she is able to tell her life story, filled with poignant recollections of childhood and sharp observations about growing up, simply by writing about the coats she’s owned.

There are romantic moments, too. In one passage, she and her husband are on vacation in Venice. He’s gone off to draw, and Zarin goes into a shop where she finds a coat she can’t resist. Even at 75% off, she doesn’t feel she can afford it, but buys it anyway. She finds out that night that a few blocks away, probably at the very same time, her husband was picking out another coat for her. He likes the coat she’s bought for herself, too, and she leaves Venice with both.