Customer Reviews

The Body Broken: A Memoir

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wow! What a good read! Lynne Greenberg's revealing and moving memoir recounts her journey into and out of the abyss of living with chronic pain. This is a beautifully written personal story that will touch anyone. She frankly discusses the trials of going through various medical therapies and takes the reader on an unsentimental ride through her personal hell and then back out - into a new, different life. This book will be healing to the millions of chronic pain sufferers and the millions more who love them and live through it with them.

This gorgeous, haunting memoir portrays Greenberg's hellish journey into the world of chronic pain without ever asking for reader's pity, and with such glorious language that the experience of reading it is remarkably enjoyable, considering the grave subject matter. Given Greenberg's position as a literary scholar, it is not surprising that interwoven throughout the book's pages are a multitude of poems and quotes and references - all relating to the universal, timeless experience of pain. At the same time, the author is at ease discussing the more mundane aspects of her journey - trips to Starbucks with her best girlfriends, retail therapy, etc. This book is not necessarily of the "feel good memoir" genre - the author is quite honest about the ongoing nature of her condition. Still, there is a realness to her voice, and a believable coming-to-terms that is ultimately uplifting and honest. I would highly recommend this memoir to any person struggling with chronic pain or illness, or to loved ones eager to provide the incredible support that Greenberg received from family and friends throughout the darkest days of her ordeal.

There is a lot to love in this book. It is not weighed down by too much verbiage. The word choice is masterful. It is beautifully written. It is simultaneously simple and complex. The poems about pain that begin each chapter act as a needle and thread sewing the narrative together. Some of us have not spent a lot of time with poetry since college; this book offers a chance to revisit some beauties with fresh explications and insights. I was left wanting to pull out some of those old anthologies. As someone who had a similar experience with the medical community, I was particularly gratified by Greenberg's description of the extremes of anger, frustration, helplessness and self-blame that a patient with a difficult-to-diagnose condition goes through. Her treatment of the doctors is fair and nuanced--she neither deifies nor demonizes. Her honesty about her failings as a mother, as a sister and as a friend is refreshing. This book is a beautiful little treasure chest.

The message that I took away from this lady's experience is that even the most savvy, affluent and well-connected people can be yanked around by the medical care system and given bad advice ad nauseam. Sometimes with costly and disastrous effects. It seems that there are some upper tier doctors in the the most reknowned hospitals and clinics who don't like to admit to ignorance and who will unconscionably prescribe potentially lethal medications and complex surgical procedures that prolong or exacerbate one's illness. It's pretty scary--your medical care can turn out to be a crapshoot in some cases.

Lynne Greenberg's "A Body Broken" is a memoir of her attempts to heal her excruciating headaches. In a way, it's similar to Paula Kamen's "All In My Head," which is also about having a chronic incurable headache. Greenberg's book is thoughtful and poetic, while Kamen uses humor to deal with her pain. Both women are fortunate to have supportive and understanding families. They also have friends and relatives who are MDs, although in both cases it turns out not to have been much help.

An English professor, Greenberg prefaces each chapter of her book with a poem. The poems are lovely, although I can't imagine reading a complex poem like "Paradise Lost" with a pounding headache. She writes beautifully about how poetry has given her a means of negotiating her constant pain--she must be a terrific teacher. As the other reviewers have pointed out, she writes without a shred of self-pity (neither does Kamen). Well worth reading.

Words cannot express how amazing this book is. It is as if someone narrated my every thought for the last 2 years and then translated it into beautiful prose. I found myself re-reading certain sentences and paragraphs over and over, equal parts awed and delighted.

I would love it if everyone read this book - then they could understand the deep abyss that chronic pain throws its sufferers into and stop asking why we can't just "think ourselves out of it." It is a baffling and soul-crushing condition and Greenberg is frank about how much her psyche suffered and still suffers. She has a much more realistic ending than most memoirs about chronic pain - one in which she is hopeful and is aware of the power of a positive attitude - but also one in which she still admits that the pain rules some days and does so with an iron fist.

Please, please, please read this if you suffer from chronic pain - just so you can feel the camaraderie and know you are not alone. Please, please, please read this if you love someone with chronic pain - as you will get an insight that we sufferers can rarely show (due to a combination of societal mores' pressure to not complain, stalwartness, and fear that we will scare you).

In the course of my research for a book partly concerned with torture, I found that there were surprisingly few decent books on pain, and that very few of those were even remotely literary. So this book is a rare bird indeed. Also surprisingly, despite the subject it's not depressing. Five stars.

There is chronic physical pain and chronic emotional pain and the two can hardly be separated. Lynne Greenberg does distinguish between the two and also shows how thay are so intimately interweaved. This is a book that is stupendous in its portrayal of constant, never ending pain that goes on for years and the frustration in trying to find medical help and the utter futility when one discovers there isn't much out there that science can help you with. So, accept and re-fresh and dig deep inside yourself and there one may find strength and some relief. Really sad and unfair and inspirational is her story.
I rate it a marvelous achievement: written with courage, humility, honesty, frustration, insecurity, madness, doubt, hope, and so humanly.
This book is of some comfort, I believe, for those with chronic pain and also an insight for others who, never having suffered so thoroughly, might tend to think, or even imply, that it's all in your head.

I've read a number of headache books and patient memoirs, but not one of them has been anything like Lynne Greenberg's The Body Broken.

Twenty-two years after a seemingly miraculous full recovery from breaking her neck in a car accident, Lynne Greenberg was struck with a severe headache that has not gone away since. In The Body Broken she chronicles her experience with this unrelenting headache in a way only an English professor could, a fact that for better or worse was never far from the front of my mind as I read her story.

Before her pain forced her to stop working, Greenberg taught and wrote about seventeenth-century British literature. She was in the process of writing a book about John Milton when she stopped working. She uses passages from his most famous work Paradise Lost and from other favorite works of literature as a framework for telling her own story.

My favorite portions of her book are those in which she is brutally honest about the ways in which her pain has distanced her from her children and the emotional pain her situation has caused them, particularly her daughter Lilly. Knowing how much guilt is often associated with being sick, I believe she must be an incredibly strong woman to face down the way her illness has shaped her relationship with her children without flinching.

Greenberg likens her situation to Adam & Eve and Paradise Lost. The idea of punishment resonates with me. I have always viewed my migraine attacks as punishment for something, never knowing what. As a kid I always secretly wondered what I'd done to deserve this kind of suffering.

Chronic pain patients will find themselves nodding along and perhaps even reliving their own journeys as Greenberg traverses the process of trying to find the right care provider and treatment plan. They will relate to the fear and anxiety of trying to decide which path to take at a fork in the road and the difficulty of trusting doctors once you've been around the block and back.

At the end of the book she includes an appendix of some of the poetry that helps her cope with her situation. These works are a beautiful end to the story she tells and far from being an unrelated extra provide another window into how she views herself and her pain. I'm not especially fond of poetry, but I can imagine that a reader who is will find much comfort in the poems she selected for inclusion.

Twenty two years after Lynne Greenberg thought she had walked away unscathed from the neck fracture she sustained at age nineteen, her ordeal came roaring back when she learned that her neck was still broken. According to Greenberg, "in the breath of a moment, I could see that my life had fractured in two as clearly as had my fractured neck."

The Body Broken details Greenberg's coming to terms with a serious debilitating condition. She doesn't pull punches as to the depths of her pain. During the summer of 2006, while in London researching for a literary criticism book, Greenberg suddenly experienced an intense headache that "has never gone away since." Greenberg's memoir explores her descent into the abyss of chronic pain, drug dependence, and despair.

Along with her story Greenberg, an English professor, weaves in pertinent poetry quotes such as this one from Mark Strand's Precious Little

". . . and nothing turns out

As you thought, then what is the difference

Between blindness lost and blindness regained."

The ending is not a "feel good one" at least in the sense of being healed. Rather it is the triumph of learning to live a full life in the face of a constant challenge (chronic pain). As Greenberg poignantly explains "in November 2007, one year and five months after my life changed, I got out of bed. Such a simple act in so many ways, so ordinary, it required just a little shift of my thinking the morning it happened. I think I'll take Lil to school today and have coffee at Starbucks with my friends, I thought. In other ways, it was a momentous shift."

The Body Broken is a compelling read, especially for anyone who has ever experienced a serious illness or been a caretaker to someone with a chronic illness.