Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Improbably funny. . . equally remarkable."
-- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Monthly *
"Can you imagine writing a whole book about being forbidden to do anything other than lie in bed? But Betty does, and she somehow makes it a riveting chronicle."
-- Lory Widmer Hess * Emerald City Book Review *
"An appetizing, well-seasoned feast. MacDonald’s sharp, witty observations as she spends almost a year in The Pines Clinic, outside of Seattle, are perfectly pitched to satisfy readers of memoirs and historical and journalistic fiction, with a huge dollop of idiosyncratic humour. It more than satisfies, in fact, because MacDonald is an impressive and engaging storyteller."
-- Jules Morgan * The Lancet *
"MacDonald writes about her seclusion in a way that is painfully, barkingly funny. . . . Her style is completely her own, the sprawling sentences packed with anecdote, incident, bang-on simile and throwaway wit—it’s like overhearing a conversation between someone who keeps forgetting to breathe and another who keeps asking ‘and what happened next?"
-- Lissa Evans * Guardian *
Table of Contents1. “Oh Captain! My Captain!”
2. I Have a Little Shadow—Who Don’t?
3. “Good-bye, Good-bye to Everything!”
4. All New Patients Must First Be Boiled
5. Oh, Salvadora! Don’t Spit on the Floora
6. Anybody Can Have Tuberculosis
7. Heavy, Heavy Hangs on Our Hands
8. I’m Cold and So Is the Attitude of the Staff
9. Kimi
10. A Smile or a Scar
11. Deck the Halls with Old Crepe Paper! Tra, La, La, La, La, Lala, La, La!
12. Occupational Therapy
13. My Operation
14. Ambulant Hospital
15. Eight Hours Up
16. A Toecover and How It Breeds
17. Privileges
18. “Let Me Out! Let Me Out!”
19. “Whom’s with Who?”
