"After great pain. . ."

In a single sitting the other evening I read Christina Crosby's A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain. It is not a perfect book - I liked least the more intellectual or academic discussions of literary texts that are interwoven with the memoir (they are all well-chosen and apt, but I think these pages and the poststructuralist moments will limit the audience of a book that otherwise should be read by huge numbers of people). But it captures the feeling of living in a profoundly damaged body in the aftermath of catastrophic accident better than almost anything else I have ever read.

I was worried about whether I should read this book at all - I am already phobic enough about riding my road bike that I don't need to read about someone's accident! But afterwards I thought - yes, I did need to read this book, for reasons that have nothing to do with cycling, and others should read it too.

Here is the statement of purpose:

Because of my condition, I've been pondering the reality that everybody has/is a body. Your body emerges through the perception of others as different from yourself, at a touchable distance, and selfhood is not self-contained. What you want, who you are, how you feel are all brought into being over time and in relation to others, and those thoughts and feelings are repeatedly inscribed, creating powerful circuits that organize a sense of embodied self. Such is human interdependency that my self-regard depends on your regard for me. I need and want a more fully livable life, which turns importantly, if not exclusively, on this play of recognition. Spinal cord injury has cast me into a surreal neurological wasteland that I traverse day and night. This account is an effort to describe the terrain. I want you to know, and I, myself, want better to understand, a daily venture of living that requires considerable fortitude on my part and a great dependency on others, without whose help my life would be quite literally unlivable.

For a short book, it manages to touch on an amazing range of subjects, all of which speak very strongly to me even in the places where Crosby's experience least resonates with my own (it is one of the sharpest ironies of the story that in her previous life Crosby was supremely embodied, a sensualist with a strong sexual dimension and a feeling of power in an athletic body - I just don't have that relationship with my body, I don't have gender or body dysphoria as such but I deeply believe that I should be existing not in a body at all but just as a pattern of intelligence and information in the cloud!). Siblings, chronic pain, the relationship between humans and dogs, death via melanoma, love and loss, motorcycles and the pleasure of the open road, breasts (one's own and those of others), the dilemma of relying on wonderful caretakers who are themselves victims of structural inequities that create shame in those who take advantage of them, the value of friendship and community, the Anabaptist tradition and how an adult seeks out versions of communities left behind - anyway, it's really gripping from start to finish. Highly recommended.