Customer Reviews

Limbo

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4 star:		(4)
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2 star:		(2)
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In "Limbo," a memoir by A. Manette Ansay, the author remembers growing up in the sixties and seventies, for the most part, with fondness. Although Ann's traditional Catholic upbringing gave her nightmares on more than one occasion, the strict rules and routines that governed her life made her feel secure. When her parents took her to Wisconsin, she got to know her large extended family, which included sixty-seven cousins. As a youngster, Ann enjoyed physical activity of any sort. She loved to run, jump, and wrestle, and she even did sit-ups and push-ups when she was in elementary school.

One of the great loves of Ann's life was music. She took piano lessons for years and practiced for hours each day. She became so proficient that she was eventually admitted to the prestigious Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore. Tragically, her promising musical career was cut short when physical symptoms that she had been battling for years suddenly grew worse. She suffered from intense pain in her arms and legs, and the doctors she consulted could not agree on a diagnosis. She tried cortisone shots, anti-inflammatory drugs, splints, braces, surgery, hypnosis, and many other treatments. Nothing cured her, although there were times when she could walk under her own power for short distances. However, because of the pain in her arms, Ann knew that she had to give up her dream of becoming a concert pianist. After much soul searching, she eventually turned to writing.

"Limbo" is an episodic memoir that goes back and forth in time. The shifts are sometimes too sudden and they give the book a choppy feel. In addition, it is a bit confusing when Ansay uses the present tense to describe events long past. However, her descriptive writing is vivid, lyrical, and evocative. She uses creative imagery to depict the people she has known and the experiences that have shaped her life. The author includes in her memoir engrossing anecdotes about a wide variety of topics, including her troubled Grandmother Ansay, the way that Chaim Potok's novel, "The Chosen" changed her view of the world, her ambivalence about religion, and her childhood worries and escapades.

The book is most affecting when Ann talks about her illness and how it transformed her. She attended and completed college, even though she was unable to take notes or written exams. Strangers stared and pointed at her in her wheelchair or made rude comments about her disability, such as, "You've got it easy--the rest of us have to walk." However, the illness brought Ann closer to her parents, especially her mother, who was an invaluable asset to her sick daughter. In 1986, Ann's mother took her on a seven-hour drive to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota every six weeks for treatments.

Today, Ansay is a successful writer, and she has come to terms with her condition. She says, "It's a good life, made up of the people I love, the novels I've written and those I plan to write . . . ." Her persistence, determination, and resilience are inspiring, and I recommend "Limbo" for those who are interested in a true story of courage and grace under pressure.

There are those who easily turn to their religion to find comfort in the midst of nearly any difficulty. Then there are those who REFUSE to do so and who are able to find their way through the pain anyway.
Ansay falls into the latter group (and I want to be clear here,...I'm not saying one viewpoint is better than the other, only pointing out the facts).
She is quite honest about her unwillingness (or inability) to make that choice for herself. She is faced with a mysterious illness and no guarantee of recovery. She may be in a wheelchair all her life. She is young.
THe result? A book about how she comes to grips with all of this WITHOUT insisting on finding "meaning" or a sense that she was destined for this or that there is some deeper significance or spiritual pattern in her illness.
If you know someone in a similar circumstance, someone for whom religion is not an easy comfort and who wonders how others have coped, this would be a perfect choice. It is also worth reading by just about anyone who wonders "What if?" or "How would I handle this?". Honest, detailed and unflinching.

A. Manette Ansay has been a favorite of mine since her first published novel "Vinegar Hill"; she's one of those authors that you buy in hardcover because you can't wait for the paperback. Her most recent novel "Midnight Champagne" was so good that it begs to be savored over and over again.

So when I saw that she had written her memoir I was anxious to read about this young writer that I so admire. Now that I have read it I have even MORE for which to admire her. The descriptions of her phisical dibilitation are heart breaking...but at the same time her spirit is uplifting; her talent is daunting.

I especially appreciate her description of losing her Catholic faith. I went through the same gamut of emotions - panic and peace - when I lost mine.

Everything she writes strikes true. I will be the first in line for her next work.

Since writing my own memoir, BABY CATCHER: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife (Scribner 2002), I have been studying the style of other memorists. I found Ansay's prose lyrical, mesmerizing, and almost poetic throughout this beautiful book. To be able to write about her losses as a result of a still-mysterious illness similar to MS, with calmness and lack of hyperbole, is admirable and enviable. From the very beginning you know this story doesn't have a happy outcome, but at no time did I feel depressed. On some level, I rejoiced for this author, for her own successes and insight and hope and the joy in small gains, small triumphs over her difficulties. Limbo is a love story, an admirable one. I wish this author lived next door to me. I would sit at her feet in awe and bake her cookies and bread at every opportunity. May she continue to write and write and write.

I enjoyed this book, for the most part. Ansay is best when she addresses her disease. This is an atypical memoir, as most memoirs concerning diseases have the following pattern: I was healthy; I became ill with a specific disease (or addicted, alcoholic, etc.); I recovered. Ansay is courageous in showing us a less "hopeful" situation. To this day, she does not have a specific diagnosis of her affliction, and not only has she not recovered, she is realistic in revealing that she may never recover. She writes about what her day-to-day life is like, and that it may never change. She also honestly writes about peoples' different reactions to her in a wheelchair; many had the gall to ask what was wrong, and others were wondering what she must have done "wrong" in a past life "to deserve this"! No one would just let her have the disease, plain and simple, and go on with her life. She shows that she is more than her disease; she is a sensitive, open writer. As other critics have noted (Sontag, etc), for some reason, our society demands that illness must have meaning. Ansay is explaining, in this memoir, that it just is what it is.

Like another reviewer before me, I have been a huge fan of Manette Ansay's fiction for years. I was first sucked in with her amazing and honest novel "Sister" (it brought me to tears several times, including on a Peter Pan bus from Boston to Springfield--thankfully I was travelling alone), and then I proceeded to read everything she published before and since. When I read that she had published a memoir about becoming a writer, I was incredibly excited and waited in anticipation to read it.

Ansay does not disappoint. In fact, this incredible, emotional, poignant (oh, I could pour on the adjectives--there are so many wonderful facets to this book--but how hard it is to find the right words to describe EXACTLY how I felt reading it) reaffirmed my love of this author's work. The book is intensely personal, which is how her fiction feels when you read it--one of the reasons why I have enjoyed her novels so much. She has a gift for capturing the details of a memory that can transport you to a time and place in her life so that you feel you were there with her, knew the people she knew. And what an incredible life journey she has had, continues to have.

Manette Ansay articulates to perfection the passing thoughts and feelings and events that happen in life. Her voice is genuine and sincere. This is one of those books that just grabs you and does not let go. Part of me wanted to read more slowly and savor the writing, while the other part just could not stop racing along, so intent was I on finding out "what happened next", how she felt, what she thought. Yes, this is a work of non-fiction, but it is REAL in many ways, not just factually. It resonates in the heart, in the mind, long after you close the book.

The book jacket promises that Manette Ansay is working on another novel--and I can barely wait.

I hated Vinegar Hill. I thought the best thing about that book was the title, which precisely depicted the content.

Ansay's Midnight Champagne, however, was completely different. Rather than bitterness and strife, it was a meandering short story full of insight, surprises, and delicious writing. It's a "keeper."

Limbo, too, is one of those books that makes you think twice before you loan it to a friend. Because the book is so good, you worry you might never get it back. Ansay's life is inspiring. Her writing is flawless. And her transitional journey from a concert pianist to a critically acclaimed writer is enlightening. To paraphrase her very words -- Ansay takes us to another country -- and helps us understand its language and its customs.

I couldn't put this book down, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in writing, music, or learning more about this talented and gifted writer.

Ansay has a gift for painting a scene complete with sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. She gracefully unfolds the moments of her life so that you don't just an observe, but rather, you experience.

From reading you learn to appreciate what it means and what it feels like to have faith, question faith, lose faith, and find it again in new forms. And she does it all without preaching.

A very honest work and well worth the read.

and I put down after only a few pages before. This time I started it I read the whole thing. The last part of the book had the deepest meeting for me. I am glad I gave it another chance. I have read her fictional story called "Sister" some time ago so I was familiar with the author. I also read the book "Read this and tell me what it means" another book by the author that book is a short story collection. I am glad I gave this book another chance. :)

"The abyss opens beneath our feet, and we leap it,
*not* because we are particularly brave, but simply
because we must. We land in a whole new country. We
put on its clothing, learn its customs, begin again .
. . ."

This book is the saga of one person's approach to the
abyss, her eventual leap, and the long process of
resettlement in the "whole new country" -- a locale in
which she resides with grace and wisdom.

The book is also a succinct autobiography,
selective in its particulars. While it begins and ends with the author's transition to chronic disability, its substantial midsection constitutes one long flashback to her most
formative years. In these pages, she allows us ever so gradually past the periphery and closer to the essence of her active, exploratory childhood and her "good-girl" adolescence in the small community of Port Washington, Wisconsin.

Especially subtle and well-crafted
are the evolving portraits of the most influential
people in her life: the feisty, sometimes fiery
immigrant grandparents; the mother who drives long
distances (often through the chilliest northern landscapes, in an unheated car) to deliver the author
to the best available music lessons; perhaps most endearing, in the end, the taciturn breadwinner-father
-- for it is her father's story, once his speech begins to flow in the face of his daughter's suffering, that ultimately anchors, even permits the telling of, her own story. As Ansay flowers into full personhood, becoming ever more accessible and sympathetic to the reader -- so does he: a man whose life was,likewise, disrupted and derailed by serious illness in his youth. They share a certain resigned if sorrowful firsthand knowledge, as well as a deep camaraderie, borne of their historical social isolation and gratuitous suffering

As the author recounts her life, she mentions almost in passing -- confessing to what she seems to
consider an amateurish avocation -- that she has written some poetry early on. However modest she herself may consider those early efforts, a fine poetic sensibility is evident throughout the description of her odyssey to the edge
of the abyss and beyond: the rhythmic flow and careful patterning of her prose, her well-honed capacity for understatement and nuance.

No doubt her writing has also been influenced by her
long and rigorous training in music. Until she is
stricken by the still-undiagnosed (demyelinating?)
disorder that forces her to leave the Peabody
Conservatory and abandon her longtime dream -- a career as a concert pianist -- music is her daily regimen, even obsession. It becomes her spiritual sustenance as well: "the purest language I knew, the bridge between what I was supposed to believe and what I knew in my heart to be true." The transition to a whole new language -- to literature and the writing of novels -- becomes her ultimate redemption and salvation; inevitably, her first language informs her second.

It is that first and dearest language -- the hours of grueling piano practice -- the push for a better instrument, a better instructor, a scholarship -- that carries her safely through the Port Washington years. Even in childhood, though, we see evidence of other strengths, such as her keen observational powers, her sensitivity to sensory input. We see through her young eyes the lush checkerboard of Wisconsin farmland, viewed from a child's perch on a bicylcle -- the squares reflecting the whole ordered lifestyle of immigrant farmers, the clearly delineated boundaries of their industrious and God-fearing moral code. We come to know, too, through the author's neurons and receptors, the omnipresence of Lake Michigan in its many moods; at a certain season, mentally strolling its beaches beside her, we can almost inhale the rich rankness of the alewives.

We also come to see how asphyxiating a small community can be in terms of its moral strictures -- its church-bound preoccupations -- and we catch glimpses of its predictably sinister underbelly. Ansay writes of growing up amid a vast, extended Catholic family, primarily originating in Luxembourg and Germany. The somewhat monolithic family, the insular and even xenophobic community (its first Jewish family arrives during Ansay's eighties-childhood, but soon returns to the city) impresses upon her relentlessly the obligation not to make waves, never to stand out too noticeably or think too highly of oneself.

Thus, as she navigates an adolescence both gifted and
repressed, it seems somewhat inevitable that resentful classmates take to terrorizing
her -- threatening gross punishments (assault, even rape) for her alleged aloofness or visible self-regard; bringing her to fear she may not even make it to graduation before she is annihilated. Her descriptions of the high school sociopaths who lurk in the shadows, of the horrifying notes slipped anonymously into her locker, will ring true for everyone who has ever been bullied in school -- for every woman or girl who has dared not to apologize for intellectual excellence or
outstanding achievment.

In fact, though she doesn't say so explicitly,
the creepy two-bit persecution Ansay recounts from her high school years is probably good preparation for her later encounters with adult-aged creeps and insensates -- with the whole gallery of unthinking, gaping, sometimes reproving or sermonizing strangers who tend to assail a visibly disabled person wherever she goes, intruding on her privacy and dignity with their endless repertoire of bizarre questions and surreal remarks.

By the time Ansay reaches her twenties -- an
expatriate Catholic with severe new medical limitations,
reconciling herself to assistive devices such as wheel
chairs and power scooters -- she seems eminently well
equipped to deal with such individuals. She dispatches
them with a wonderful, dry, ironic sense of humor that
had me laughing and reading passages out loud to those
few people in my own life who might understand. The
smarmy, patronizing salesman; the man in the cultish
pain management program whose hand she would rather
not be holding during Twelve-Step-esque vespers; the
intrusive evangelist who speaks to her of throwing away her wheel chair -- all are fair game for Ansay's droll, subtle, devastating wit.

This memoir properly belongs to the genre of
such outstanding works as Nancy Mairs's *Waist-High in
the World,* Oliver Sacks's *A Leg to Stand On,* and
the wonderful New Yorker piece by Laura Hillenbrand
(author of *Seabiscuit*), "A Sudden Illness -- How My
Life Changed.* It might be read especially
appropriately as a complement to the fine expository
volume and research study *When Walking Fails* by Lisa
Iezzoni, a distinguished Harvard health researcher and
veteran of MS.

All refugees -- abyss-leapers, entrants into the
wilderness -- must typically limit their luggage
severely, settling on a few spare, precious remnants
they will transport into that whole new country.

This spare, poetic, insightful memoir --
marked up in black ballpoint and yellow highlighter,
extruding additional notes and comments on multiple
rainbow-Post-Its -- elegantly truthful, no matter how
hard the truths -- calmly, sometimes delightfully companionable in its recounting of familiar interpersonal misunderstandings at once horrific and hilarious -- is definitely one of my own essentials, to be tucked into my specially lightweight backpack or that small, handy storage space just under the seat of my walker.

Elizabeth Rasche Gonzalez
Medical/Legal Writing & Editorial Services
Chicago, Illinois
Email: poetryperson@sbcglobal.net

The author is a longtime medical writer and midlife law graduate (admitted to the bar in 1994). Since 1997, she has been disabled by defective spinal hardware, surgically implanted to correct scoliosis. In the past five years, she has undergone six additional spinal revision surgeries. Elizabeth owns and manages a 488-member forum for other adults with scoliosis who are coping with ongoing problems arising from Harrington rod instrumentation: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FeistyScolioFlatbackers