The cri de coeur [of My Heart Is Broken] could not be more astringently ironic, coming as it does—in the brief story to which it also gives a name—from the lips of a hare-brained waif married to a construction engineer in a Canadian wilderness, who out of witless boredom gets herself laid in the woods by one of her husband's work mates…. "He wasn't even friendly. It's the first time in my life somebody hasn't even liked me … My heart is just broken."

But hearts are not broken in Mavis Gallant's stories. The people she writes about, all of them transplanted from somewhere else, have been taught "to go blank in the presence of worry and pain, and … that it was foolish to weep." Their roots are cut, and her subject is the nature of the life that is left when the roots are not fed...