The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects
by Bee Wilson
Review by Rosa
Sentimentality manages to creep its way into all corners of my life. I love an heirloom, an artefact, a random and clearly well-loved op-shop find. I hold onto scraps: tickets from theatre shows and film screenings, silly little notes that my friends have written to cheer me up, and worn-out clothes that I hope I’ll find the find the time and energy to metamorphose so I can carry around the memories woven into the fabric in a new way.
The Heart-Shaped Tin celebrates such stories of items that often get overlooked or shoved to the back of the cupboard; in this case, a washing-up bowl, a salt shaker, a toast rack. Through a series of essays, Bee Wilson creates an experience that I can only describe as a combination of a niche anthropology class and sitting with someone as they sift through a memory box and share the stories of each item with you. In doing so, Wilson transforms these relatively mundane bits and pieces into time-machines and talismans of our messy emotionality and the conflicting permanence and impermanence of it. I loved and learned a lot from each little essay and will never look at the contents of my kitchen cupboards the same way again.
Material culture is magical! Everything has a story worth telling and I find that so, so enthralling.
Recommended for those who enjoyed Deborah Levy’s The Position of Spoons: and Other Intimacies and Annabel Hirsch’s The History of Women in 101 Objects.
