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.
I always love Sonya Huber's writing--poetic, witty, sardonic, wise. With this book, she's your Virgil as she takes takes you into the nine (or more) circles of chronic pain. As the back cover copy advises, this is not simply a personal memoir of pain, but an exploration of pain as a medical experience, as a feminist issue, as a family member, as a poem, as a political act. It should be read by patients, doctors, and....everyone else.