Writing works on memory, compressing and doubtless distorting the past, and offers bodies for the inspection of reader and writer alike. Amber can be remarkably clear, but the piece that conserves a suspended life is even more valuable. Tropes transport memories and transform them, as resin is transformed under pressure into amber, sometimes with a small, ancient bit of life suspended inside. Each sentence begun can wander off, sometimes irretrievably into confusion and mistake,s sometimes to greater clarity. Writing offers, not a way out, but a way into the impossible dilemmas of not-knowing. Writing helps to teach us what we can't know otherwise, which makes it a demanding and invaluable discipline.

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.“Writing, no matter the subject, has its way with the writer. 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.ĭeeply 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. 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. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. 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. Print A Body, Undone - Living on after Great Pain

A Body, Undone by Christina Crosby