Death and fashion abound in Jeanne Beker's new memoir, 'Heart on My Sleeve'

TORONTO — Jeanne Beker didn’t set out to write a memoir about loss.But after fashion, death is the second through line in “Heart on My Sleeve,” which tells the TV personality’s life story as reflected by the items in her wardrobe. Such morbidity might seem a departure for the effervescent fashion journalist, but at 72, Beker has lost a lot of people: her parents, close childhood friends, many of the fashion designers she came to know over the course of her career.At the forefront of Beker’s literary closet is an item long stored in the back of her mother’s literal one: a tattered leather satchel she’d carried with her through the Holocaust as she and her husband — Beker’s father — evaded Nazis. It was filled with photos of their family members, none of whom made it out alive. “I grew up hearing stories about death. I grew up hearing stories about the Holocaust and the grandparents that I never knew and the aunts and uncles and cousins I never had,” Beker…