The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir - Sophie Strand

In this lyrical, radically expansive self-portrait, celebrated poet, author, and lecturer Sophie Strand explores-with searing insight and honesty-the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves. At age sixteen Sophie Strand-bright, agile, fearless-is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie''s life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore? In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers readers a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness-a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networ
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