Main description:

Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays about living with chronic pain. Sonya Huber moves away from a linear narrative to step through the doorway into pain itself, into that strange, unbounded reality. Although the essays are personal in nature, this collection is not a record of the author's specific condition but an exploration that transcends pain's airless and constraining world and focuses on its edges from wild and widely ranging angles.

Huber addresses the nature and experience of invisible disability, including the challenges of gender bias in our health care system, the search for effective treatment options, and the difficulty of articulating chronic pain. She makes pain a lens of inquiry and lyricism, finds its humor and complexity, describes its irascible character, and explores its temperature, taste, and even its beauty.

Contents:

Preface
Acknowledgments

I. Pain Bows in Greeting
What Pain Wants
The Lava Lamp of Pain
Welcome to the Kingdom of the Sick
The Alphabet of Pain
Prayer to Pain

II. Side Projects and Secret Identities
My Alternate Selves with Pain in Silver Lame Bodysuits
The Cough Drop and the Puzzle of Modernity
From Inside the Egg
Cupcakes
Amoeba Girl

III. My Machines
The Status of Pain
Peering into the Dark of the Self, with Selfie
Augmentation
Interstate and Interbeing
Pain Woman Takes Your Keys

IV. Bitchiness as Treatment Protocol
On Gratitude, and Off
Life Is Good1,2,3
Dear Noted Feminist Scholar

V. Intimate Moments with the Three of Us
A Pain-Sex Anti-Manifesto
The Joy of Not Cooking
Kidney Stone in My Shoe
If Woman Is Five
A Day in the Grammar of Disease

VI. Measuring the Sky
Vital Sign 5
Alternative Pain Scale
In the Grip of the Sky
Between One and Ten Thousand
Inside the Nautilus

Sources