Description
Book SynopsisRate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed.
Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays about living with chronic pain.
Trade Review"If this isn't the book that we in the pain community need in 2017, I don't know what is."—Matt Mendenhall, Pain-Free Living Magazine
"The theorist Elaine Scarry, in her magnum opus
The Body in Pain, writes, 'The utter rigidity of pain itself is that its resistance to language is not simply one of its incidental or accidental tributes but is essential to what it is.' One can see Sonya Huber's
Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System as a glorious refusal of what Scarry puts forth. With ardor and valor, Huber renders the lived experience of chronic pain and all that attends it in a language all her own, written—as she so wonderfully phrases it—using 'pain's alphabet.' These essays make imprecision their enemy as they comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Pain Woman further establishes Sonya Huber as one of the most exciting voices writing creative nonfiction today." —Vincent Scarpa,
Electric Literature "Sonya Huber has restored my faith in chronic illness narratives. . . . Now, if I have my way, this book will sneak its way into the lives of many future readers, regardless of their personal experience with chronic illness."—Taylor Wilke,
Rumpus“Sonya Huber works magic by articulating the indescribable. With her lyrically written and witty account, she better describes her own pain experience than a patient rating scale of 1 to 10 ever could.”—Paula Kamen, author of
All in My Head “This is an important book, a necessary book, a book that, in the right hands, could change how our medical establishment deals with pain. These essays are at once vulnerable and fierce, funny and smart, unflinching and dappled with stunning metaphor.”—Gayle Brandeis, author of
Fruitflesh “Huber has captured what it is to be a woman who lives with chronic pain in all its nuanced complexity.”—Sarah Einstein, author of
Mot: A MemoirTable of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
I. Pain Bows in Greeting
What Pain Wants
The Lava Lamp of Pain
Welcome to the Kingdom of the Sick
The Alphabet of Pain
Prayer to Pain
II. Side Projects and Secret Identities
My Alternate Selves with Pain in Silver Lamé Bodysuits
The Cough Drop and the Puzzle of Modernity
From Inside the Egg
Cupcakes
Amoeba Girl
III. My Machines
The Status of Pain
Peering into the Dark of the Self, with Selfie
Augmentation
Interstate and Interbeing
Pain Woman Takes Your Keys
IV. Bitchiness as Treatment Protocol
On Gratitude, and Off
Life Is Good1,2,3
Dear Noted Feminist Scholar
V. Intimate Moments with the Three of Us
A Pain-Sex Anti-Manifesto
The Joy of Not Cooking
Kidney Stone in My Shoe
If Woman Is Five
A Day in the Grammar of Disease
VI. Measuring the Sky
Vital Sign 5
Alternative Pain Scale
In the Grip of the Sky
Between One and Ten Thousand
Inside the Nautilus
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