Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System (American Lives)

Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System (American Lives)

Rate 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. Sonya Huber moves away from a linear narrative to step through the doorway into pain itself, into that strange, unbounded reality. Although the essays are personal in nature, this collection is not a record of the author’s specific condition but an exploration that transcends pain’s airless and constraining world and focuses on its edges from wild and widely ranging angles. Huber addresses the nature and experience of invisible disability, including the challenges of gender bias in our health care system, the search for effective treatment options, and the difficulty of articulating chronic pain. She makes pain a lens of inquiry and lyricism, finds its humor and complexity, describes its irascible character, and explores its temperature, taste, and even its beauty.   "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 "Huber uses pain as a lens through which she examines disability, gender bias, motherhood, and the very basic condition of living in a body....The lyricism and poetry-prose hybrid continues throughout the book, interspersed with narrative reported pieces, humorous anecdotes, and sharp social commentary. [An] honest, wise, and droll book."-Gila Lyons, Bitch Media, Jan. 25, 2017 "Meditative, intimate essays consider the experience of suffering....Frank, thoughtful reflections that should resonate with the 47 percent of Americans reported to be living with chronic pain." Kirkus, Nov. 21, 2016 Sonya Huber  is an associate professor of English at Fairfield University. She is the author of Opa Nobody (Nebraska, 2008), Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (Nebraska, 2010), and The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton .