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A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain
A compelling account of recreating a life through writing, memory, and desire
In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed.
In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation.
Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of "diving into the wreck" of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.
In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed.
In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation.
Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of "diving into the wreck" of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published March 15, 2016
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About the author
Christina Crosby
5 books8 followersChristina Crosby is a Professor of English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She is the author of The Ends of History: Victorians and the 'Woman Question' (1991) and has published essays and reviews in Victorian Studies, PMLA, College English, and elsewhere.
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June 30, 2017I'm not going to rate this, because it was so painfully honest that I feel weird assigning a star quality to someone's life and suffering.
August 5, 2016
Crosby teaches English and gender studies at Wesleyan University. Her inclusion in this “Sexual Cultures” series has to do with her lesbian feminist ideology but also the new understanding of her body an accident forced upon her at age 50. While she was cycling, a stick stuck in her spokes and she fell over onto concrete, slamming her chin and breaking vertebrae in her neck that damaged her spinal cord. In the midst of a full and physical life, she became a quadriplegic. The great irony was that in this she joined her brother Jeff, whose MS had long since reduced him to a wheelchair.
Here, in a memoir written 11 years after the accident, she reflects on chronic pain and her new limitations – even including bowel habits – with blunt honesty as well as literary allusions. Along the way she remembers some physical pleasures now mostly denied to her: alcohol, sex with her partner Janet, and playing with the dog. Her attitude to her diminished body may seem pessimistic, but it’s as realistic as it is sad: “I no longer have a gender. Rather, I have a wheelchair. … The future of my body can only be worse than it is now.” Nonetheless, she never comes across as feeling sorry for herself. I found this to be highly absorbing.
Here, in a memoir written 11 years after the accident, she reflects on chronic pain and her new limitations – even including bowel habits – with blunt honesty as well as literary allusions. Along the way she remembers some physical pleasures now mostly denied to her: alcohol, sex with her partner Janet, and playing with the dog. Her attitude to her diminished body may seem pessimistic, but it’s as realistic as it is sad: “I no longer have a gender. Rather, I have a wheelchair. … The future of my body can only be worse than it is now.” Nonetheless, she never comes across as feeling sorry for herself. I found this to be highly absorbing.
August 5, 2016
Lots to admire in this, including the author's refusal to offer a triumphal narrative about living with severe pain, in her case from a spinal chord injury. Instead she reflects on and mourns her earlier pleasures of embodiment, from sex to booze to playing with her dog. I even liked the chapter about her bowel movements (hey you either like a good chat about this, or you don't, in my experience).
May 15, 2021
This is a memoir of trauma and tragedy trying to be a disability memoir. Or, it's a disability memoir so heavily informed by grief for a lost body that it doesn't do the disability work it sets out to do. This book is, in brief, heavily informed by Crosby's five-plus decades not only as an abled person, but an abled sibling of a disabled (MS) brother, and further as an abled person whose gender, sexual, and social identities are heavily informed by physical ability. With all this as background, the memoir quickly devolves from an account of writing against temporality and through the unspeakable, into a work that tends to exploit others' disabled experiences (particularly her brother's) as agencyless foils to her own newfound disability (and the fantasies of youth/able-bodiedness she links to her tomboy/butch identity).
There is, no doubt, a place for grief and mourning when one acquires a disability, particularly in the case of a tragic accident like Crosby's. Yet Crosby leans so strongly into the ableist rhetoric of disability-as-doom, as the foreclosure rather than the opening of possibility, that it's difficult to understand what this memoir was intended to do other than reinscribe disability as unqualified misery. Though occasional lip service is paid to interdependence, there is no engagement with critical disability studies anywhere in the entire text (despite ample engagement with psychoanalysis and literary theory), and that lack of engagement impedes not only the quality of the memoir itself but also, it seems, Crosby's ability to write into her new embodied reality –– one that was, unfortunately, cut short by pancreatic cancer early this year.
There is, no doubt, a place for grief and mourning when one acquires a disability, particularly in the case of a tragic accident like Crosby's. Yet Crosby leans so strongly into the ableist rhetoric of disability-as-doom, as the foreclosure rather than the opening of possibility, that it's difficult to understand what this memoir was intended to do other than reinscribe disability as unqualified misery. Though occasional lip service is paid to interdependence, there is no engagement with critical disability studies anywhere in the entire text (despite ample engagement with psychoanalysis and literary theory), and that lack of engagement impedes not only the quality of the memoir itself but also, it seems, Crosby's ability to write into her new embodied reality –– one that was, unfortunately, cut short by pancreatic cancer early this year.
January 20, 2021
2.5 stars: This would've been a slightly higher 3, but too much negatively built up over the course of the book, and too much of the storyline devolved.
I'm fascinated by the stark difference between having pain suddenly onset, after an injury, vs. to have it slowly onset through a longer-term illness process. Degrees of adjustment and acceptance can vary widely, and those differences pose important questions about social support for people with chronic pain and disability. But I also find myself resentful of the immediate disgust a lot of previously able-bodied folks feel for their new, disabled bodies, and the intensity with which they spout internalized ableism about being "better off dead." I worry these statements, more palatable to those still able-bodied and less complicated and intangible than my own experiences with slower onset, will become the narrative of disability, rather than narratives that prioritize truly improved modes of thinking, accessibility, and social resources (ex., crip joy?). This book also strikes me as too representative an example of lateral ableism against folks with I/DD, with repeated currents of, Thank goodness my *brain* wasn't injured! And many of the sections on Jeff's MS feel voyueristic and limited in analysis.
The earlier sections on the constraints of how we in the U.S. have structured caregiving are most interesting, but then the book quickly sinks into too much background on childhood exploits and unrelated tangents, when it would have been better to have more depth and examination of "interdependence," especially as made political, around some of these issues entirely glossed past.
I'm fascinated by the stark difference between having pain suddenly onset, after an injury, vs. to have it slowly onset through a longer-term illness process. Degrees of adjustment and acceptance can vary widely, and those differences pose important questions about social support for people with chronic pain and disability. But I also find myself resentful of the immediate disgust a lot of previously able-bodied folks feel for their new, disabled bodies, and the intensity with which they spout internalized ableism about being "better off dead." I worry these statements, more palatable to those still able-bodied and less complicated and intangible than my own experiences with slower onset, will become the narrative of disability, rather than narratives that prioritize truly improved modes of thinking, accessibility, and social resources (ex., crip joy?). This book also strikes me as too representative an example of lateral ableism against folks with I/DD, with repeated currents of, Thank goodness my *brain* wasn't injured! And many of the sections on Jeff's MS feel voyueristic and limited in analysis.
The earlier sections on the constraints of how we in the U.S. have structured caregiving are most interesting, but then the book quickly sinks into too much background on childhood exploits and unrelated tangents, when it would have been better to have more depth and examination of "interdependence," especially as made political, around some of these issues entirely glossed past.
February 2, 2023
while certainly a /good/ memoir, this didn’t give me everything i wish it did. it did, however, make me want to talk to christina so, so badly.
February 20, 2017
lovely chapters on shit and sex, unabashed vulnerability and sorrow
June 11, 2025
Heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and enduring, Christina Crosby's memoir is one of the most challenging books I have read in a long time. Reading in detail about Christina's accident, what it did to her body and her life, about her struggles to live on after such catastrophic injury, and also about the life that brought her to and through that point was difficult. Difficult enough that I had to put it down for a while several times -- sometimes for weeks at a time -- to absorb and process what I'd read. I returned to my quotidian life and escaped into beloved fiction that did not force me to confront such horrors in the real world. Having had the great gift of knowing Christina and being mentored by her as a Women's Studies student at Wesleyan decades ago, the devastation of the accident and the losses she suffered hit me particularly hard.
Yet, reading this book was also a pleasure. Yes, a pleasure. To grapple again with her supple mind, as she grappled with her life and her loves and her losses, was to be challenged anew by a woman who taught me to see and think critically about the world in so many ways. For that, I am grateful. I am grateful that Christina lives and continues to struggle and continues to share the gifts of her supple mind and her vitality with all of us who come in contact with her and her work. What she comes to at the end of the book is truly beautiful, in all its complexity and horror and refusal to let us imagine that she has somehow triumphed over adversity, even as in important ways she has.
In my reading, at least, this book is full of love stories -- love for her lover, for her brother, for her parents, for her self and life before the accident, and in its very existence, perhaps most of all, for the self that keeps going and unfolding all she can unfold before her. Continuing to grapple, to struggle, to live in her body, undone.
Finally, I'll leave you with Christina's words. I am grateful she engaged and continues to engage in this process: “Chronic pain and grief over loss nonetheless remain as unavoidable facts of lives shaped by catastrophic accident, chronic and progressive illness, or genetic predisposition. Despite their strategic elision in disability studies or transcendence in happy stories in the popular press about trauma overcome, bodily pain and grief persist, to be accounted for as best one can. This book is my contribution to that record. I find that Emily Dickinson is right -- in the wake of great pain, the pulse of life slows, and the interval between life-sustaining beats interminably extends. Life is suspended. In that interval, the difference between the one you once were and the one you have become must be addressed, the pain acknowledged, and the grief admitted. It can be a treacherous process, given all that might be lost.”
Yet, reading this book was also a pleasure. Yes, a pleasure. To grapple again with her supple mind, as she grappled with her life and her loves and her losses, was to be challenged anew by a woman who taught me to see and think critically about the world in so many ways. For that, I am grateful. I am grateful that Christina lives and continues to struggle and continues to share the gifts of her supple mind and her vitality with all of us who come in contact with her and her work. What she comes to at the end of the book is truly beautiful, in all its complexity and horror and refusal to let us imagine that she has somehow triumphed over adversity, even as in important ways she has.
In my reading, at least, this book is full of love stories -- love for her lover, for her brother, for her parents, for her self and life before the accident, and in its very existence, perhaps most of all, for the self that keeps going and unfolding all she can unfold before her. Continuing to grapple, to struggle, to live in her body, undone.
Finally, I'll leave you with Christina's words. I am grateful she engaged and continues to engage in this process: “Chronic pain and grief over loss nonetheless remain as unavoidable facts of lives shaped by catastrophic accident, chronic and progressive illness, or genetic predisposition. Despite their strategic elision in disability studies or transcendence in happy stories in the popular press about trauma overcome, bodily pain and grief persist, to be accounted for as best one can. This book is my contribution to that record. I find that Emily Dickinson is right -- in the wake of great pain, the pulse of life slows, and the interval between life-sustaining beats interminably extends. Life is suspended. In that interval, the difference between the one you once were and the one you have become must be addressed, the pain acknowledged, and the grief admitted. It can be a treacherous process, given all that might be lost.”
February 1, 2020
A Body, Undone is a memoir about life after traumatic spinal injury and paralysis and I have an immense respect for Crosby and the work she's done to reclaim what she can of life, and her openness about the losses that linger. This is not a book that falls into the "inspiration porn" category, and the writing varies between beautiful and brutal.
For me, one of the most affecting parts was her comparison of her paralysis to that of her brother, who became paralyzed and died due to Multiple Sclerosis, not injury. The meditation on gender, able-bodiedness, and sexuality was... I don't quite know how to talk about its effect on me. I started this year with reading some Ivan Coyote, and I kept thinking about Crosby's experiences in relation to Coyote's experience of butchness and sexuality as intertwined with physical ability. That's something I feel, too, though I don't pretend to be butch (nor does Crosby claim the moniker unreservedly). It's part of how society trains us: to be capable is to be masculine. To be dependent is to be feminine. Femininity is inherently uncomfortable, and is meant to be. I'm reading into the text, but only a little.
The main weakness for me was that Crosby over-academicizes. She's an academic, so that makes sense, and she's aware of the tendency, but she's incapable of letting a statement stand without walking it back, without crawling once more inside of it and ripping apart her own experiences. Memoir, as a genre, encourages such over-analysis of self, but that's not a strength.
For me, one of the most affecting parts was her comparison of her paralysis to that of her brother, who became paralyzed and died due to Multiple Sclerosis, not injury. The meditation on gender, able-bodiedness, and sexuality was... I don't quite know how to talk about its effect on me. I started this year with reading some Ivan Coyote, and I kept thinking about Crosby's experiences in relation to Coyote's experience of butchness and sexuality as intertwined with physical ability. That's something I feel, too, though I don't pretend to be butch (nor does Crosby claim the moniker unreservedly). It's part of how society trains us: to be capable is to be masculine. To be dependent is to be feminine. Femininity is inherently uncomfortable, and is meant to be. I'm reading into the text, but only a little.
The main weakness for me was that Crosby over-academicizes. She's an academic, so that makes sense, and she's aware of the tendency, but she's incapable of letting a statement stand without walking it back, without crawling once more inside of it and ripping apart her own experiences. Memoir, as a genre, encourages such over-analysis of self, but that's not a strength.
April 8, 2021
Loved this so much. It hit me hard to read that Christina Crosby died in January. This is a powerful, thoughtful memoir about sudden disability, informed by queerness, gender, lesbian feminism, sex positivity, academia. Lots of unpacking of the grief and internalized ableism that comes from such a sudden and traumatic change in ability. Intellectual and emotional.
February 14, 2025
Anyone notice how I'm obsessed with corporeality? Also I keep accidentally reading academic memoirs... Oops. #sopredictable
July 23, 2017
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Recommended on the library website, "A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain," never promised to be an uplifting, inspirational book. And it isn't, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Most books written after tragedy (in this case, Crosby became paralyzed in a bike riding accident) are about life before the accident, the accident that leads to paralysis, the struggle (presented with either extraordinary insight or humour) and then a contented and perhaps even "better" life after the struggle.
Not here. No way.
Crosby, a professor of English and Gender, Feminist, and Sexuality studies, writes in great detail and with professorial flourish, about agonizing pain, betrayal of the bowels, and frustration with an atrophying body. Crosby, a soft butch lesbian, writes of how she is unused to being incorrectly misgendered by so many (welcome to the world of the not-so-soft butch lesbian), it's worse as she is now very visible (as a person with a disability) and thus subject to patronizing misgendering and the inherently uncomfortable apology. “I no longer have a gender. Rather, I have a wheelchair.”
Crosby writes extensively of alienation – of body, of sexuality, of sensation – and that alienation can be overwhelming. Her intelligence is evidenced as she breaks down the intersectionality of race, wealth and personal care, for example, but the body… the body is the alien.
Which frankly I am glad to read. I can't tell you the number of times I have rolled my eyes or huffed under my breath when people throw out those pithy quotes, almost always out of context, simplified and misunderstood. Like Nietzsche’s quote, “That which does not destroy me makes me stronger” and Eleanor Roosevelt's "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."
I think Crosby would call bullshit on these kinds of tropes.
I knew going in that this was not going to be a fun, light read. I rarely enjoy those kinds of books anyway. But even now, a few days after finishing the book, I can't say I enjoyed this. It's well-written, intelligent, insightful but... enjoyable? Nah. I don't think it was ever intended to be.
Most books written after tragedy (in this case, Crosby became paralyzed in a bike riding accident) are about life before the accident, the accident that leads to paralysis, the struggle (presented with either extraordinary insight or humour) and then a contented and perhaps even "better" life after the struggle.
Not here. No way.
Crosby, a professor of English and Gender, Feminist, and Sexuality studies, writes in great detail and with professorial flourish, about agonizing pain, betrayal of the bowels, and frustration with an atrophying body. Crosby, a soft butch lesbian, writes of how she is unused to being incorrectly misgendered by so many (welcome to the world of the not-so-soft butch lesbian), it's worse as she is now very visible (as a person with a disability) and thus subject to patronizing misgendering and the inherently uncomfortable apology. “I no longer have a gender. Rather, I have a wheelchair.”
Crosby writes extensively of alienation – of body, of sexuality, of sensation – and that alienation can be overwhelming. Her intelligence is evidenced as she breaks down the intersectionality of race, wealth and personal care, for example, but the body… the body is the alien.
Which frankly I am glad to read. I can't tell you the number of times I have rolled my eyes or huffed under my breath when people throw out those pithy quotes, almost always out of context, simplified and misunderstood. Like Nietzsche’s quote, “That which does not destroy me makes me stronger” and Eleanor Roosevelt's "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."
I think Crosby would call bullshit on these kinds of tropes.
I knew going in that this was not going to be a fun, light read. I rarely enjoy those kinds of books anyway. But even now, a few days after finishing the book, I can't say I enjoyed this. It's well-written, intelligent, insightful but... enjoyable? Nah. I don't think it was ever intended to be.
November 9, 2021
The author is an English professor and I found she tried too hard to differentiate her writing style by choosing bizarre adjectives (anyone who has ever had sex with another person she was describing was referred to as their lover which got really bizarre when she referred to her cyclist friend as her playmate when you realize her "playmate" is also her old lover's lover).
It did not read like a memoir. It did not have a beginning or and end. I found the book focused on 3 topics: gender/labels (she's pro gender fluidity but hypocritically breaks down the lesbian community into two categories and is obsessed with labeling personalities), sex (who the fuck describes their mother as having "sensual pleasures" while describing how her mother really enjoys food), and bowel movements. Basically, those 3 topics just circled in and out of the book.
I should want to like this author but I don't. She somehow barely described herself except for how much she likes sex and is obsessed with sexualizing things. I haven't felt so turned off by a memoir in a long time but to say it was a painful read but I found myself saying "gross" out loud often while reading it. Thank god it's just 202 pages.
It did not read like a memoir. It did not have a beginning or and end. I found the book focused on 3 topics: gender/labels (she's pro gender fluidity but hypocritically breaks down the lesbian community into two categories and is obsessed with labeling personalities), sex (who the fuck describes their mother as having "sensual pleasures" while describing how her mother really enjoys food), and bowel movements. Basically, those 3 topics just circled in and out of the book.
I should want to like this author but I don't. She somehow barely described herself except for how much she likes sex and is obsessed with sexualizing things. I haven't felt so turned off by a memoir in a long time but to say it was a painful read but I found myself saying "gross" out loud often while reading it. Thank god it's just 202 pages.
February 7, 2017
A thoughtful and candid reflection on Crosby's severely disabled life after a bicycle accident paralyzed her neck, this memoir is a much-needed meditation on grief in the wake of acquired disability, and will likely be valuable to those in similar situations, though possibly not so much to those coming from a more pro-disability or further post-disability standpoint. I appreciated her reflections on interdependency and vulnerability the most; and her chapter on bowel movements.
May 9, 2016
I reviewed this beautiful memoir for Inside Higher Ed:
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/...
https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/...
June 23, 2016
A very powerful poignant memoir. Somewhat self analytic but a vivid description of paraplegia and the power of love.
June 13, 2016
cerebral and intimate and funny and terribly honest and real. couldn't put it down.
August 13, 2019
An exquisite book, in every sense
July 16, 2024
chase gave me this book and i really loved it. i love reading about queer people finding themselves and going through change. it makes me feel like its all gonna be okay
March 18, 2016
Do not like it.
July 9, 2021
I can see why this text has become a milestone text in disability studies—it’s a raw, elegiac, well-constructed reflection on unfathomable loss and the horror of continued, unbearable existence. Crosby uses literature (and often Victorian literature at that—very much appreciated) to work through her experience of breaking her neck and being left paraplegic, developing an idiom of grief that refuses any of the banal (and false) “here’s my empowering disability journey” clichés one encounters so often. Yet, reading this, I wondered if the book would have been as impactful if it hadn’t been written by a famous Wesleyan professor—whether the insanely privileged life Crosby led before and after her injury in fact pushed this work above the threshold of notice for people who would not have otherwise picked it up. Is it audible because it was written by someone of the upper middle class? Do we only listen to people narrating their experiences with their bowel program if they’re white and wealthy?
While Crosby is aware of the many, many racial and class privileges her life afforded her, and while the book doesn’t pretend to be anything but a deeply personal reckoning with loss, I couldn’t but ask myself how someone with fewer resources than her (like, 99% of the population in the United States) would experience a similar injury. The life she enjoyed before her accident is fantastically out of reach for the vast majority of people, making her sound starkly oblivious to issues of class and access. For many chapters, she articulated being burdened by the fact that her life simply won’t be as fun anymore—I get that, of course, but I would have liked to see at least one disclaimer about how many people, abled and disabled, can never even aspire to the intensely rich life she lived for fifty years. Crosby was a person who wanted—and a person who was used to getting what she wanted. And what she had before she broke her neck was a life of ease: She had a strong, abled, toned body and a love for exercise. She had confidence and beauty enough to have experienced a long and adventurous love life soaked in pleasure. Both her parents had been professors, and she enjoyed an expensive elite education. She landed a tenure-track job at an elite institution right out of grad school (that institution even paid for her wheelchair—needless to say, jobs like that are going to disappear within the next decade or two without a radical about-turn in academia). She had a faithful, devoted partner teaching in a similarly secure job, ensuring that they could more or less hang on to their previous standard of living. After her injury, she could rely on dozens of friends and colleagues who supported her care for years and years. She had insurance and ability to pay for two home health aides and accessibility upgrades to her house. Like, wow.
So, to curtail my rant, I wanted some sense of activism, some sense of rage at the way the United States doesn’t care for the vast majority of people with severe disability like Crosby’s. For something written by a queer activist and scholar, this book was remarkably silent about disability studies, community building, and about how her experience must look to people with comparable disability but who are less well off. Why rely on psychoanalysis when there’s a whole other field from which to articulate one’s loss?
While Crosby is aware of the many, many racial and class privileges her life afforded her, and while the book doesn’t pretend to be anything but a deeply personal reckoning with loss, I couldn’t but ask myself how someone with fewer resources than her (like, 99% of the population in the United States) would experience a similar injury. The life she enjoyed before her accident is fantastically out of reach for the vast majority of people, making her sound starkly oblivious to issues of class and access. For many chapters, she articulated being burdened by the fact that her life simply won’t be as fun anymore—I get that, of course, but I would have liked to see at least one disclaimer about how many people, abled and disabled, can never even aspire to the intensely rich life she lived for fifty years. Crosby was a person who wanted—and a person who was used to getting what she wanted. And what she had before she broke her neck was a life of ease: She had a strong, abled, toned body and a love for exercise. She had confidence and beauty enough to have experienced a long and adventurous love life soaked in pleasure. Both her parents had been professors, and she enjoyed an expensive elite education. She landed a tenure-track job at an elite institution right out of grad school (that institution even paid for her wheelchair—needless to say, jobs like that are going to disappear within the next decade or two without a radical about-turn in academia). She had a faithful, devoted partner teaching in a similarly secure job, ensuring that they could more or less hang on to their previous standard of living. After her injury, she could rely on dozens of friends and colleagues who supported her care for years and years. She had insurance and ability to pay for two home health aides and accessibility upgrades to her house. Like, wow.
So, to curtail my rant, I wanted some sense of activism, some sense of rage at the way the United States doesn’t care for the vast majority of people with severe disability like Crosby’s. For something written by a queer activist and scholar, this book was remarkably silent about disability studies, community building, and about how her experience must look to people with comparable disability but who are less well off. Why rely on psychoanalysis when there’s a whole other field from which to articulate one’s loss?
July 31, 2024
I don’t know fully where to begin with this book. Although it’s a memoir, Crosby is an English and Gender studies professor, so the writing is academic and thought-provoking in nature. I found her ideas accessible but deep and her life story was interesting to read.
However, I read the book for a disability studies lens and instead what I would say about it is this: disability bookends conversations on grief, sexuality, and gender — all concepts which it feels Crosby has explored more deeply and analytically than the disabled experience. It is very clear when she is writing about her subjects of expertise, mainly gender and queer studies and how her identity as a queer woman has impacted her life, and also her discussion on Victorian literature are clear and concise. Versus, instead, disability feels more like a grappling with both her own identity and her brother’s identity (which at times felt like a grab for re-understanding her body through an experience she didn’t have).
I found a lot of the disability musings to border on ableism, even if they were internalized ableism that she felt about herself or picked up from her brother, they were still difficult to read coming from an extremely intelligent and theoretical woman. When she compares her body and accident to a horror movie in the concluding pages, it felt like there was no progress on the disability-identity front (for her or the community or any non-disabled person trying to understand the disabled experience).
In her life, parties were no longer accessible, her lecture hours were cut, she gained newfound understanding for how many things require physical labor — where is the conversation about forging accessible society? The disability rights movement? This isn’t something I’d ask of any book. But in a memoir that touches on racism, sexism, homophobia and aspects of those injustices entrenched within society, I believe Crosby had both the space and academic background to expand into that territory for disability.
The book should also come with a huge trigger warning for grief because half of it is discussing, in great detail, tremendous loss. I think there’s time and space to talk about death/loss/grief in conjunction with the grief of body-function loss due to disability. But that was all this was, and it didn’t leave me with a particular sense of hope for myself or the wider disability community.
So the 3 stars, for a beautifully written book which toed the line between academia and memoir, a woman’s life encapsulated in pages, and the well-discussed elements. But also for my disappointment at the ways in which disability was handled.
However, I read the book for a disability studies lens and instead what I would say about it is this: disability bookends conversations on grief, sexuality, and gender — all concepts which it feels Crosby has explored more deeply and analytically than the disabled experience. It is very clear when she is writing about her subjects of expertise, mainly gender and queer studies and how her identity as a queer woman has impacted her life, and also her discussion on Victorian literature are clear and concise. Versus, instead, disability feels more like a grappling with both her own identity and her brother’s identity (which at times felt like a grab for re-understanding her body through an experience she didn’t have).
I found a lot of the disability musings to border on ableism, even if they were internalized ableism that she felt about herself or picked up from her brother, they were still difficult to read coming from an extremely intelligent and theoretical woman. When she compares her body and accident to a horror movie in the concluding pages, it felt like there was no progress on the disability-identity front (for her or the community or any non-disabled person trying to understand the disabled experience).
In her life, parties were no longer accessible, her lecture hours were cut, she gained newfound understanding for how many things require physical labor — where is the conversation about forging accessible society? The disability rights movement? This isn’t something I’d ask of any book. But in a memoir that touches on racism, sexism, homophobia and aspects of those injustices entrenched within society, I believe Crosby had both the space and academic background to expand into that territory for disability.
The book should also come with a huge trigger warning for grief because half of it is discussing, in great detail, tremendous loss. I think there’s time and space to talk about death/loss/grief in conjunction with the grief of body-function loss due to disability. But that was all this was, and it didn’t leave me with a particular sense of hope for myself or the wider disability community.
So the 3 stars, for a beautifully written book which toed the line between academia and memoir, a woman’s life encapsulated in pages, and the well-discussed elements. But also for my disappointment at the ways in which disability was handled.
August 16, 2018
I was assigned this book as a part of my Freshman seminar at Wesleyan University. At first I was skeptical of the book, overwhelmed by the heat of summer work and excitement of a first summer away from high school, that I pushed my readings to late nights without sleep and quick skims of the general content in search of something meaningful to reflect on in my early August paper. It was only after I took a break from work and began to read at a steadier, more relaxed pace that I discovered the wonderful memoir I held in my hands.
Crosby wrote a book that speaks to parts of me that I am only now ready to explore. Over the last few years I have suffered great changes, combined with the losses of growing up, getting sick and needing to reframe my entire life in order to keep living. Although never as intense as Crosby’s experience, I connected to the words she said. The difficulty of moving on, the paradox of letting go while also remembering what got you there. I had always been interested in how other people dealt with great change, in my opinion Crosby did one of the most impressive jobs at it. She used her outlet of language as a means to move on, as I often times do with my voice. Her analysis of gender, family, social norms and the absurdity (at times) of her situation are truly a oxymoron of heartbreaking and heartwarming.
“I am no longer what I once was- yet come to think of it, neither are you. All of us who live on are not what we were, but are becoming, always becoming.”
I am very excited to be meeting Crosby in a few weeks, where an open seminar of discussion about the novel is encouraged. I do hope to see much of her on my path towards a Feminism, Gender and Sexuality studies minor and am given the opportunity to praise her book around my peers, as any good teachers pet would.
Crosby wrote a book that speaks to parts of me that I am only now ready to explore. Over the last few years I have suffered great changes, combined with the losses of growing up, getting sick and needing to reframe my entire life in order to keep living. Although never as intense as Crosby’s experience, I connected to the words she said. The difficulty of moving on, the paradox of letting go while also remembering what got you there. I had always been interested in how other people dealt with great change, in my opinion Crosby did one of the most impressive jobs at it. She used her outlet of language as a means to move on, as I often times do with my voice. Her analysis of gender, family, social norms and the absurdity (at times) of her situation are truly a oxymoron of heartbreaking and heartwarming.
“I am no longer what I once was- yet come to think of it, neither are you. All of us who live on are not what we were, but are becoming, always becoming.”
I am very excited to be meeting Crosby in a few weeks, where an open seminar of discussion about the novel is encouraged. I do hope to see much of her on my path towards a Feminism, Gender and Sexuality studies minor and am given the opportunity to praise her book around my peers, as any good teachers pet would.
January 13, 2025
“I begin in that leaden place where pain seems on the other side of language, and work toward living on.” I first heard about Christina Crosby’s memoir A Body, Undone: Living On after Great Pain from Maggie Nelson; Crosby was injured in a bike accident, rendering her quadriplegic, and Nelson’s experience of caring for her friend and former teacher informed the writing of two of her books, the acclaimed Bluets and the poetry collection Something Bright, Then Holes. In her memoir, Crosby even addresses the poems, “a second gift to me, for they represent to me my life as another saw it in those first months […] a time that left a deep, […] overwhelmingly painful impress on me, and suspend my life in the richness of poetic language.” A very literary and analytic memoir, it is also full of reflections on gender, sexuality, sex and desire (as a young woman, as a lesbian, as a quadriplegic person), religion and faith, and the act of care. She also writes about her brother’s MS diagnosis in his late twenties, and her love for her dogs, the pain of not being able to actively care for something that needs you. Certain images recur: “My body was alien to me, and lost in space.” “I only knew that I had been grievously injured, and was lost in space.” The memoir asks “What does it take to make a life *liveable*?”, and insists that “Your body has and is a history.” The memoir’s final chapter, ‘Living On’, posits the importance of writing, especially in recovery: “When I was first hurt, I began to feel a dense and obdurate need to put into words a body that seemed beyond the reach of language.” “Writing has turned me in ways I didn’t know I was going to go”.
January 10, 2019
A Body, Undone, by Christina Crosby, is an account of Christina's life after she became paralyzed when she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle and was pitched forward, landing on her chin and becoming instantly paralyzed. I was interested in reading this book because I knew Crosby years ago when I was a student at Wesleyan University, where Crosby is still a professor of English, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
A Body, Undone was a difficult book to read. Christina was a woman who took great pride in her body – her athleticism, her strength, her independence, her physical and sexual relationship with her partner. She was, as she said, in the prime of her life when her life was completely and irrevocably altered. She is now totally dependent on others to keep her alive.
While I didn’t think the writing was all that compelling – I never stopped to reread a particularly beautiful line – I was taken in by how open and honest Christina is about her new body. She shares intimate details (her bowel movement regiment, eg) that force the reader to confront some distrubing realities about life in a paralyzed body. She details some horrifying scenes. This book is not for the squeamish.
Review by Michelle M.
A Body, Undone was a difficult book to read. Christina was a woman who took great pride in her body – her athleticism, her strength, her independence, her physical and sexual relationship with her partner. She was, as she said, in the prime of her life when her life was completely and irrevocably altered. She is now totally dependent on others to keep her alive.
While I didn’t think the writing was all that compelling – I never stopped to reread a particularly beautiful line – I was taken in by how open and honest Christina is about her new body. She shares intimate details (her bowel movement regiment, eg) that force the reader to confront some distrubing realities about life in a paralyzed body. She details some horrifying scenes. This book is not for the squeamish.
Review by Michelle M.
October 23, 2025
At the end of chapter 4 she writes:
“I don’t talk much about the pain to anybody other than my therapist, who is not my lover, or my friend, or a member of my family, or my colleague. To her I will complain bitterly, but not to others. I won’t complain about the pain because such plaints become corrosive, and would eat at the ties that bind me to others. It’s not that I’m bravely suffering in silence, but rather that I know there’s nothing to be done.”
This idea has helped me learn to not resent people that could not hold things for me by remembering they aren’t my therapist and when in times of great suffering, complaints seldom inform. When there is nothing to be done, they just corrode. Having people and needing them are such vastly different things. Sometimes the amount of love you have for a person can never correlate to how helpful they are when you need them. I love that though. Crosby touches on this idea at many points in the book. (Having Janet around but hiring help for things she needs)
I loved this book when I read a few chapters in college. Never knew how much it would mean to me in the years after.
Kind of funny though She’s A professor at my college rival. GO BANTS!!
“I don’t talk much about the pain to anybody other than my therapist, who is not my lover, or my friend, or a member of my family, or my colleague. To her I will complain bitterly, but not to others. I won’t complain about the pain because such plaints become corrosive, and would eat at the ties that bind me to others. It’s not that I’m bravely suffering in silence, but rather that I know there’s nothing to be done.”
This idea has helped me learn to not resent people that could not hold things for me by remembering they aren’t my therapist and when in times of great suffering, complaints seldom inform. When there is nothing to be done, they just corrode. Having people and needing them are such vastly different things. Sometimes the amount of love you have for a person can never correlate to how helpful they are when you need them. I love that though. Crosby touches on this idea at many points in the book. (Having Janet around but hiring help for things she needs)
I loved this book when I read a few chapters in college. Never knew how much it would mean to me in the years after.
Kind of funny though She’s A professor at my college rival. GO BANTS!!
April 3, 2022
A lifetime of joy found in cycling came crashing to an end, as did the author's ability to walk, to reach, to care for herself one otherwise unremarkable day. A well told story of the loss of all that is taken for granted in life until it is gone. That is a cliche but that makes it no less true here, where the writing is well done and the pain of losing one's ability to express just about everything, including sexuality, is laid bare. Of particular note is the author's loss of her brother in similar fashion, not from an outside agent but from a neurodegenerative disease. That one's companion in life would become a companion in a new, compromised life, was not a welcome irony, but it was walked through, lived through, nonetheless.
November 9, 2023
Unlike several of the other memoirs of life lived with a disability that I have read recently, Christina Crosby was an accomplished adult, in her fifties when her bicycle snagged on a branch and sent her flying over the handlebars to land on her chin. A college professor, a terrific writer, someone who was used to pushing herself physically, she had to figure out what her life would look like going forward.
She has resources, friends, and a strong, loving relationship, and she is able to construct a life that still has many of the joys it had before. Her ability to write about these challenges and circumstances is remarkable.
She has resources, friends, and a strong, loving relationship, and she is able to construct a life that still has many of the joys it had before. Her ability to write about these challenges and circumstances is remarkable.
November 18, 2017
This felt like a useful story to tell, but the writing style was odd. It was often overly poetic, so sentences could end up wordy or unclear. She'd sometimes refer to her mother as Mother, other times by her name, in a way that felt clunky, and she'd refer to "Jake" without explaining that this was her nickname for her partner Janet (it took the whole book for me to figure this out). Structurally it was kind of choppy, too, like a bunch of essays with tangents. The story was interesting, as she told about details of quadriplegia that are rarely shared. (the bowel movements, a bit about sex)
April 12, 2021
Though I found the writing a bit harder to read, the story though sad is very interesting. To hear how Christina adjusted to being paralyzed after a bike accident at 50 - the physical changes, the changes in her relationships, work - truly horrible situation to deal with. On top of watching her brother suffer and become paralyzed from ALS(pretty sure) - the similarities, things she wished they'd talked about.... Her memoir describes what it is like to live and love in this newly broken body. She is a professor at Weslyan.
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