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

Sonya Huber

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496200839
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Rate your pain on a scale of oneto 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• I. Pain Bows in Greeting
• II. Side Projects and Secret Identities
• III. My Machines
• IV. Bitchiness as Treatment Protocol
• V. Intimate Moments with the Three of Us
• VI. Measuring the Sky
• Sources
• About Sonya Huber
• Series List
• Other Works by Sonya Huber