The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves
- ISBN-10
- 1429960957
- ISBN-13
- 9781429960953
- Category
- Biography & Autobiography
- Pages
- 224
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2010-03-02
- Publisher
- Henry Holt and Company
- Author
- Siri Hustvedt
Description
In this unique neurological memoir Siri Hustvedt attempts to solve her own mysterious condition While speaking at a memorial event for her father in 2006, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. Despite her flapping arms and shaking legs, she continued to speak clearly and was able to finish her speech. It was as if she had suddenly become two people: a calm orator and a shuddering wreck. Then the seizures happened again and again. The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves tracks Hustvedt's search for a diagnosis, one that takes her inside the thought processes of several scientific disciplines, each one of which offers a distinct perspective on her paroxysms but no ready solution. In the process, she finds herself entangled in fundamental questions: What is the relationship between brain and mind? How do we remember? What is the self? During her investigations, Hustvedt joins a discussion group in which neurologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and brain scientists trade ideas to develop a new field: neuropsychoanalysis. She volunteers as a writing teacher for psychiatric in-patients at the Payne Whitney clinic in New York City and unearths precedents in medical history that illuminate the origins of and shifts in our theories about the mind-body problem. In The Shaking Woman, Hustvedt synthesizes her experience and research into a compelling mystery: Who is the shaking woman? In the end, the story she tells becomes, in the words of George Makari, author of Revolution in Mind, "a brilliant illumination for us all."
Get the book
Similar books
-
The Shaking Woman Or a History of My Nerves
By Siri HustvedtIn this unique memoir, Hustvedt chronicles her attempts to solve her own mysterious neurological condition and, along the way, ponders the distinction between the brain and the mind.
-
Churchill's Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill
By Geoffrey WheatcroftThis revelatory new book takes on Churchill in his entirety, separating the man from the myth that he so carefully cultivated, and scrutinizing his legacy on both sides of the Atlantic.
-
A Plea for Eros: Essays
By Siri HustvedtHe had left Norway when he was twenty-two to make his fortune in America and ended up outside Chicago, where he had worked as a carpenter. Uncle David was fun. He walked for miles every day, played strenuous games with us, ...
-
What I Loved: A Novel
By Siri HustvedtA powerful and heartbreaking novel that chronicles the epic story of two families, two sons, and two marriages Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved begins in New York in 1975, when art historian Leo Hertzberg discovers an extraordinary painting by ...
-
Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting
By Siri HustvedtIn this book, Hustvedt gives us nine essays on the significance of particular works of art, replete with original insights and a few startling discoveries.
-
Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays
By Siri HustvedtHe was tall and strong, a carpenter, woodchopper, and builder of fires, friend to all mammals and insects, a storyteller, a smokering-blower, and of course, a man who went to work, where he taught college students and engaged in various ...
-
The Summer Without Men: A Novel
By Siri HustvedtA comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment." Mia Fredrickson, the wry, vituperative, tragic comic, poet narrator of The Summer Without Men, has been forced to reexamine her own life.
-
The Blindfold
By Siri HustvedtFrom the author of The Blazing World, “a work of dizzying intensity…eloquent and vivid” (Don DeLillo), about a young Midwestern woman who finds herself entangled in intense circumstances—physical, cerebral, and existential—when ...
-
I Am Ozzy
By Ozzy OsbourneThe final word in sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne shares his unbelievable story for the first time in this tell-all memoir.
-
The Sorrows of an American: A Novel
By Siri HustvedtHere we are, I thought, the squat, wet Walrus and the high and dry Carpenter, an absurd pair: cabbages and kings. “I think I should warn you, well, alert you to the fact that there may be some unsavory, yes, unpalatable, ...