Rating: 
Summary: perspective
Review: The author gives an important perspective on chronic, undiagnosed pain. As in _Vinegar Hill_ , her knowledge of Catholism is incorrect.
Rating:
Summary: Criqique
Review: This book, to be fair, should be critiqued by a handicapped person. Even if their handicaps aren't the same, experiences are pretty much the same. As a handipped person, I think this writer made up much of what she claims to have experienced, not about her illness and her experience with going from doctor to doctor and resisting permanence but about her experiences with people. Those seem to me to be a lot of fiction based on fact. It wasn't until the last few pages of the book that I started agreeing with her. But even there she didn't go far enough. I'm sure that a memoir written by a 37 year old (which is the age I believe she was when she wrote this last year) is ridiculous; at that age you still have a lot of life left to experience, and you certainly aren't as wise about your past as you will be when you're older. Even at 45, I'm wiser than I was at 37. And "wiser" is important when you're philosophizing about your condition like she did in that book. The biggest thing she doesn't get yet, which surprises me since she has kids, is that what happened to her hurt her parents much, much more than it did her. She sort of mentions that near the end of the book when she talks about her father finally saying, after all those years, it's too bad this had to happen to you. Notice, though, the emphasis she puts on it taking him so many years to say that. Throughout the book, she constantly puts down two things: her parents and the Catholic church. Of course, her parents aren't the same as mine, but I still think she's unnecessarily hard on them. It made me dislike her, as a matter of fact. And, as a former Catholic trying to justify her attitude toward the Catholic church, she puts in print absolute falsehoods about the Catholic church. This made me think she's not as smart as she thinks she is. For instance, she insists that the Catholic church teaches that limbo is a place where even 2-day-old babies go if they haven't been baptized, which is untrue, and I think someone should call her on that. The Catholic church does not teach that; the author is remembering incorrectly something that she thinks a teacher said when she was in elementary school. But the last few pages of the book were good. As a handicapped person who became handicapped at exactly the same time of life when she did, when I was 20 and in the middle of my college education, I understood more, I'm sure, than a nonhandicapped person would when she said that becoming handicapped isn't so much a travesty as it is something that just is, something that is more remarkable than awful (to paraphrase). She talks endlessly about all her pain before and now, and I think it may be similar to mine. I'm never not in pain, but I've found that, when you talk about it, you're more aware of it, so talking about it isn't good. I talked about it a lot the first couple/few years after I became handicapped only because I didn't think it would last forever, much like when you have a headache and complain about that. That's where I understood her resistance; she didn't think it was permanent. I would never write a whole book about my life. It would bring up too many memories I'm happy to forget about. I don't know how she could.
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