Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

by Sonya Huber

Overview

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803299917
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Series:	American Lives
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

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. 

Table of Contents

Preface    
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    

Sources    
 

Editorial Reviews

"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

Rumpus - Taylor Wilke

"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 

Electric Literature - Vincent Scarpa

"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

Pain-Free Living Magazine - Matt Mendenhall

“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
 

Gayle Brandeis

“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
 

Paula Kamen

“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 Memoir

Sarah Einstein

2016-11-21
Meditative, intimate essays consider the experience of suffering.At the age of 39, Huber (English/Fairfield Univ.; The Evolution of Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2016, etc.) was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and Hashimoto's thyroiditis, autoimmune diseases that cause severe joint pain, surges of fever, and often loss of mobility. In this collection of essays written during the past five years (some previously published), the author reflects on her struggle to reassess her identity and make sense of affliction from diseases that flare up unpredictably and uncontrollably. She is dismayed by physicians who prefer not to deal with incurable illness because they "have been trained in environments of competition where cures and successes are prized." She rails against doctors who cynically assume that she is trying to elicit prescriptions for opioids and others who ask her to rate her pain on a scale from one to 10, a rubric that she deems inadequate for expressing and treating pain. More helpful, she has found, is the McGill Pain Questionnaire, which opens with the salient question: "What Does Your Pain Feel Like?" Well-meaning friends who suggested herbal medicines or exercise convinced Huber that the "massive gulf separating the pained from the non-pained can be summed up in one question: ‘Have you tried yoga?' " Pain infuses her life: cooking, sex, caring for her son, teaching, and writing—which sometimes, she admits, "has been my only relief." Her voice as "pain woman," she discovers, is different from her other writing voices. "She has a kind of messianic confidence that I do not have in my normal writing or even in my normal living," she writes. "Pain woman" surely gives voice to the feistiest essays in this uneven collection. Although Huber strives for metaphors to express her pain, she does not always succeed, and probing her experiences sometimes results in claustrophobic repetition. Frank, thoughtful reflections that should resonate with the 47 percent of Americans reported to be living with chronic pain.

Kirkus Reviews