Illness is often a transformative experience. In What Her Body Thought, Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Susan Griffin describes the years of suffering and frustration that marked her battle against an autoimmune fatigue disorder. Her experience comes to resonate in her own mind with the fate of the famous 19th-century courtesan Marie Duplessis, the inspiration for both Dumas's La Dame Aux Camelias and Verdi's La Traviata (and, by extension, the 1937 Garbo classic Camille). Griffin is not the first writer, of course, to tackle the notion of disease as social epiphany--among the most notable are Norman Cousins (Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient) and Susan Sontag (Illness as Metaphor). But Griffin is a particularly fearless teacher; she writes passionately about the culture of blame that attaches words like psychosomatic to etiologies it does not fully understand. And as her disease drains personal and financial resources, she discovers how terrifyingly easy it is to become someone whom society overlooks. We have made progress since the 19th century in our understanding of health and medicine, Griffin concludes, but we have failed miserably in our social obligation to extend those benefits to all who suffer and to teach compassion to those who don't. --Patrizia DiLucchio
From Publishers Weekly
"The life of the body is at the heart of my story," declares philosopher, ecologist and feminist theorist Griffin, as she describes her harrowing descent into serious illness. An astute cultural critic, Griffin probes two stories of illnessAher own and the archetypal tale of women and illness Camille (in book, play, opera and film form)Ain an effort to explore the role of illness and healing in society. At the core of Griffin's ruminative narrative is her battle with Chronic Fatigue Immune Deficiency Syndrome (CFIDS). The disease has left her bedridden, unable to care for her own most basic needs and frightened that she will die alone. Raw with grief over her loss of health and fearful of penury as she becomes unable to work, Griffin has also felt tremendous shame at being betrayed by her bodyA"like a lover seduced and abandoned." She is angry at the way her illness has been minimized by the scientific and medical communities, even by her own friends. Griffin has an exquisite sense of place and a gripping yet lyrical style. However, her constant return to the themes of Camille wears thin by the book's end, and the short prose poems interspersed throughout are distractingAalternately florid and flat. Despite these flaws, the book offers valuable insights into illness and society, elucidating Griffin's theory that "illness itself uncovers hidden reserves of strength." Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
As in Kat Duff's Alchemy of Illness (Bell Tower, 1994), feminist Griffin uses her personal battle with chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS) as a springboard for a critique of Western medical practices. More importantly, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Griffin (The Eros of Everyday Life, LJ 11/1/95) vividly describes the compound effect of the illness's mysterious symptoms and the absence of adequate social support structures on her mental outlook. Griffin brilliantly summons sensual and emotional impressions from her childhood as she speculates that psychological factors may have contributed to her contracting CFIDS. She also puts her tale in historical context by poetically weaving in the story of Marie de Plessis, the 19th-century French courtesan whose tuberculosis inspired Alexandre Dumas's novel and play (and later the Greta Garbo film) Camille. Highly recommended for philosophy and women's studies collections.AKim Baxter, New Jersey Inst. of Technology, Newark
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
If a single thread runs through Griffin's deeply felt and creatively intellectual books, it is her recognition that truth always makes itself known. As Griffin struggled to understand the hidden origins and painful lessons of the disease she suffered from for an anguished decade, chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS), she recognized the "pattern of neglect" that shaped her childhood. She also found herself drawn to the story of another woman's illness, that of a celebrated eighteenth-century Parisian courtesan, who was portrayed first by Alexandre Dumas, then by Verdi in La Traviata, and christened Camille in a George Cukor film starring Greta Garbo, and who lost her looks, lovers, and fortune to tuberculosis. As Griffin compares her ordeal to that of Camille's, she examines the nexus of disease, shame, sexuality, and poverty then and now in a feminist variation on Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor. Ultimately, Griffin's passionate inquiry greatly extends our understanding of the body-mind connection and of how profoundly our complex responses to illness and healing are shaped by social mores. Donna Seaman
From Kirkus Reviews
This challenging and provocative chronicle of an illness reaches far beyond the author's symptoms to incorporate the romance of Camille, a child's abandonment, the body's relationship to nature and to history, money, poetry, the environment, democracy, and the loss of a certain kind of consciousness. Griffin (The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender, and Society, 1995, etc.) has been called ``a great visionary'' by some critics; she clearly has a vision, but one that resembles a Moebius strip more than a straight line. For instance, she argues that the body, as well as the mind, retains both personal and social history. So-called psychosomatic disease is not the body acting out the mind's repression, but a teamwork approach as it were, as the body ``thought, felt, and expressed everything that my mind did.'' But, Griffin points out, insurance won't pay for a psychosomatic diagnosis. This was of no little consequence to her, since her diagnosis, CFIDS (chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome), a true viral infection with debilitating symptoms, bore the stigma of the earlier ``Yuppie disease,'' chronic fatigue syndrome. Unable to work, at times unable even to get out of bed, Griffin envisioned terminal poverty and herself as a victim of the mercantile body, consumed by consumption. Hence, she explores the life of another woman who died from consumption, Marie de Plessis, courtesan extraordinaire (fictionalized by Dumas as the Lady of the Camellias and famously portrayed by Bernhardt, Garbo, and Callas), whose tubercular deterioration paralleled Griffin's own decline. Her survey of Camille's history in Paris also opens inquiries into shame, medical care, money, and death, and loops back at last to the authors alcoholic mother. Narrative chapters are interspersed with poetic stanzas. Close reading of this deceptively simple itinerary from Berkeley to Paris is required; stay with itan extraordinary number of ideas from, birth to earth, are plowed and seeded. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"A beautiful book. Susan Griffin contemplates the mortal body with subtlety and care. The music of her elegant language joyfully comforts the reader. Here are illuminating stories. Poetry. Philosophies of life." -- Maxine Hong Kingston, author of Tripmaster MonkeyHis Fake Book
"Powerful and profoundly insightful . . . An act of creative
imagination unlike anything I have ever read."
-- -- Richard Restak, New York Times Book Review
"It is sometimes hard to even breathe while reading parts of Susan Griffin's gripping new work. . . . Elegant and eloquent, she weaves a magic spellof words and facts." -- Bay Area Reporter
"Powerful and profoundly insightful . . . An act of creative imagination unlike anything I have ever read." -- Richard Restak, New York Times Book Review
"Susan Griffin has created through the suffering and awareness of her own body in sickness and in health, a powerful and at times, painful, text that informs and illuminates the Body Politic. Parallel lives. Parallel stories. Here is a tale of two spirited women struck down by disease in different centuries and different countries. The questions held inside their cells prompt us to ask, "How do we seek a true democracy within the ills of society when they manifest within our own bodies?" "How do we liberate illness from a fear of poverty?" And "What is the path toward healing?" Once again, the heat of Griffin's prose burns a hole in the rhetoric of the status quo and we see a window into the health of our own bodies and a responsive citizenry. What Her Body Thought is politics and poetry woven through the connective tissue of one of our finest writers." -- Terry Tempest Williams, author of Desert Quartet
"Susan Griffin's work takes us deep into uncharted territory. Places that remind us to be grateful we have a guide. Her work is harrowing, original, brilliant and (Goddess help us) true." -- Alice Walker, author of By the Light of My Father's Smile and The Color Purple
"This wonderfully subtle weave of thoughts, observations and reflections on illness and meaning is vintage Griffin. As she takes us into the heart of illness, we also learn much about our society and its social order. And it'sall done with a lyrical beauty that touches the soul." -- Lillian B. Rubin, author of The Transcendent Child
Product Description
In this boldly intimate and intelligent blend of personal memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Susan Griffin profoundly illuminates our understanding of illness. She explores its physical, emotional, spiritual, and social aspects, revealing how it magnifies our yearning for connection and reconciliation.
Griffin begins with a gripping account of her own harrowing experiences with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS), a potentially life-threatening illness that has been misconstrued and marginalized through the label "psychosomatic." Faced with terrifying bouts of fatigue, pain, and diminished thinking, the shame of illness, and the difficulty of being told you are "not really ill," she was driven to understand how early childhood loss made her susceptible to disease.
Alongside her own story, Griffin weaves in her fascinating interpretation of the story of Marie du Plessis, popularized as the fictional Camille, an eighteenth-century courtesan whose young life was taken by tuberculosis. In the old story, Griffin finds contemporary themes of "money, bills, creditors, class, social standing, who is acceptable and who not, who is to be protected and who abandoned." In our current economy, she sees "how to be sick can impoverish, how poverty increases the misery of sickness, and how the implicit violence of this process wounds the soul as well as the body."
Griffin insists that we must tell our stories to maintain our own integrity and authority, so that the sources of suffering become visible and validated. She writes passionately of a society where we are all cared for through "the rootedness of our connections. How the wound of being allowed to suffer points to a need to meet at the deepest level, to make an exchange at the nadir of life and death, the giving and taking which will weave a more spacious fabric of existence, communitas, community." Her views of the larger problems of illness and society are deeply illuminating.
About the Author
Susan Griffin is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated A Chorus of Stones, as well as the bestselling Woman and Nature, Pornography and Silence, and The Eros of Everyday Life.
