They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat was published by Peachtree Publishers in 1982, following Grizzard’s first open-heart surgery in 1982 at Emory University Hospital. Born with a congenital heart defect (a malformed aortic valve, probably rheumatic in origin), Grizzard would undergo four heart operations over his lifetime, the last of which killed him in 1994 at age forty-seven.
The book turns medical crisis into comedy — but comedy with a dark undertow. Grizzard describes the hospital experience with his characteristic eye for absurdity: the indignity of gowns, the terror of anesthesia, the surreal conversations with doctors who discuss sawing open your chest with the same casualness they might use ordering lunch. The humor is defensive (if you can joke about it, it can’t kill you) and the defenses are transparent (the reader knows the comedy is holding terror at arm’s length).
The title is pure Grizzard: the clinical reality (valve replacement surgery) expressed in the vocabulary of country-western heartbreak. It’s a joke, but it’s also literally true — they did open his chest, they did remove his heart from its cavity, they did replace a valve — and the collision between medical fact and emotional metaphor gives the book its energy.
The book established what would become a recurring motif in Grizzard’s work: the awareness of mortality, the sense of borrowed time, the determination to be funny about being scared. Each subsequent heart surgery produced another book, and the series became darker as the surgeries became more dangerous.
Collecting They Tore Out My Heart
First edition (Peachtree Publishers, Atlanta, 1982): Softcover original.
Market values:
- First printing: $8–$20
- Signed copies: $20–$50