What Her Body Thought

by Susan Griffin

In this boldly intimate and intelligent blend of personal memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Susan Griffin profoundly illuminates our understanding of illness. She explores its physical, emotional, spiritual, and social aspects, revealing how it magnifies our yearning for connection and reconciliation. Griffin begins with a gripping account of her own harrowing experiences with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS), a potentially life-threatening illness that has been misconstrued and marginalized through the label "psychosomatic." Faced with terrifying bouts of fatigue, pain, and diminished thinking, the shame of illness, and the difficulty of being told you are "not really ill," she was driven to understand how early childhood loss made her susceptible to disease. Alongside her own story, Griffin weaves in her fascinating interpretation of the story of Marie du Plessis, popularized as the fictional Camille, an eighteenth-century courtesan whose young life was taken by tuberculosis. In the old story, Griffin finds contemporary themes of "money, bills, creditors, class, social standing, who is acceptable and who not, who is to be protected and who abandoned." In our current economy, she sees "how to be sick can impoverish, how poverty increases the misery of sickness, and how the implicit violence of this process wounds the soul as well as the body." Griffin insists that we must tell our stories to maintain our own integrity and authority, so that the sources of suffering become visible and validated. She writes passionately of a society where we are all cared for through "the rootedness of our connections. How the wound of being allowed to suffer points to a need to meet at the deepest level, to make an exchange at the nadir of life and death, the giving and taking which will weave a more spacious fabric of existence, communitas, community." Her views of the larger problems of illness and society are deeply illuminating.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Health, Disability, Philosophy

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Susan Griffin is an award winning poet, writer, essayist and playwright who has written nineteen books, including A Chorus of Stones, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Named by Utne reader as one of the top hundred visionaries of the new millenium, she is the recipient of an Emmy for her play Voices, an NEA grant and a MacArthur Grant for Peace and International Cooperation. Her latest work, Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy, on being an American Citizen has been called "fresh, probing" and "incisive" by Booklist.

Reviews

[Beverly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing account of one woman's struggle with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Disorder syndrome in the present paralleled with the story of a courtesan in France dying of tuberculosis. The courtesan is the one that Greta Garbo portrays in the 1936 movie Camille. Camille gave up her life for that of the man she loved.

The book focuses, to a large extent, on the social, political and economic aspects of having a chronic illness and how vulnerable it makes one emotionally and socially.

It's not a "light reading" type of memoir, Griffin wants her readers to take an in-depth look at many aspects of chronic illness. I read it because I have chronic Lyme and I found much of what she said to be sadly true, yet the book is full of hope. Loved it!

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chronic illness memoir AND literary criticism/history? Sign me the fuck up. *heart eyes emoji*

[Hollie Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost gave up on this book. But glad I didn’t. There were some real gems of seeing the myriad disparity of all that is life and turning it, just a touch, in order to see that it’s all one. Quite well done, kind of hard to read, at times engrossing, at times meandering and on the verge of losing me. But isn’t that just like life?

[Nilchance · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rambling stream-of-consciousness book that's more philosophy than memoir. I really enjoyed it when it actually talked about Griffin's experiences with chronic fatigue syndrome, but it meandered too much and I was pretty happy to be done.

[Peggy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is slow going--it's one pearl of wisdom after another. Most interesting are Griffin's insights about the life of Marie Duplessis (the model for the Marguerite Gautier, "Camille") and those of Alexandre Dumas pere and fils, in particular, her description of poverty, household funds gained and lost, and slavery. But I lost my patience when she began examining her childhood in excruciating detail, looking for the causes of her chronic fatigue syndrome. Her gaze is intense, and she does not look back with humor or compassion, but with the attention of a scientist seeking evidence. She describes the process of being shaped into an acceptably middle class grammatically-correct girl from rough and unkempt beginnings. This was where I lost interest in her quest for self-knowledge. Her attention is too closely personal. I needed more perspective, a broader focus, in order to care.

[Heidi Kuchta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued by the interconnecting ideas about disease, desire, and human connection presented by Ms. Griffin, but found myself annoyed with the writer's self-professed obsession with Camille. In other words, her literary/film critique and analysis of Camille (the character and Greta Garbo movie) was boring to me as someone who has never seen the movie, but I stuck it out for the rest of the book and overall am happy I read it. It's a topic (or range of topics) I am interested in exploring in my own writing, but I didn't think Griffin took most of her ideas far enough to be super compelling. A good read, but not a great one. Now I want to watch Camille though!

[Janene AKA Ms. Palumbo · Rating 1 out of 5]

BOOOOORRRIIINNGG...... This book spends the first chapter and unfortunately many other chapters comparing the author's life with movie I've never seen. I did like the part of the author describing her body as seen through the mind of child but that was not nearly enough for me to finish this book.

[Tori]

Stopping 1/4 of the way through. The language and writing were nice, but I felt like it was tough with the cognitive challenges of CFS/ME.

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed A Chorus of Stones more

[Leia Lanstov]

Everytime I pick a non-fiction, I am left despaired. Tutut when will I learn?