Synopsis
In the mundane act of picking up her child, Suzanne Berger incurs a severe back injury that leaves her suddenly and dramatically disabled. Because the muscles for sitting are torn and using a wheelchair for any length of time is impossible, she finds herself literally horizontal. In this dazzling memoir, Berger charts her course from this almost completely horizontal existence to partial mobility and finally to tentative uprightness and walking. With vigor, insight, and black humor, Berger portrays the phantasmagoric universe caused by her unusual physical placement in the world. She captures the emotional vicissitudes of confinement and chronic pain, seismic changes in personal relationships, mind/body unity and disparity, and greatly modified parenthood in a series of mesmerizing stories about everything from blissful aquatherapy sessions in a rehabilitation hospital to raging tirades addressed to Mr. Rogers from the TV room floor. In the tradition of Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a
Reviews
While bending down to pick up her infant daughter, Berger suffered a freak spinal injury that kept her flat on her back for seven years. Initially, use of a wheelchair was impossible, because sitting up for more than five minutes was too painful. Through courage, determination, rehabilitation therapy and the support of her husband, she learned to walk again, and this intensely lyrical, introspective, deeply moving journal charts her triumph over years of confinement, isolation, depression and outpatient treatment. A Pushcart Prize-winning poet and freelance writer, Berger sensitively records her life's cataclysmic changes. As friends deserted her, she coped with chronic, grinding pain, cooked while supine and worried about instilling fear and panic in her growing daughter. Those affected by sudden injury will find her story inspirational. Translation/film/audio rights: International Creative.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A woman with a temporary but grievous disability reveals with bitterness, insight, and humor what it is to be immobile and horizontal in a world of the mobile and vertical. This first book of nonfiction by Berger, an award-winning poet (These Rooms and Legacies, not reviewed), is filled with the vivid images one expects from a writer with a poet's eye. While in the prime of life she suffered a sudden, severe injury that left her unable to sit or stand for more than brief moments. In mostly short essays on disability, personal relationships, isolation, confinement, and recovery (the piece on aquatic therapy appeared in slightly different form in the ``Hers'' column of the New York Times Magazine), she tells of her success at making Christmas cookies on the kitchen floor, of a disastrous evening at a theater that could not or would not accommodate the lawn chair she planned to recline in, of her inability to attend a family funeral, of checking into a rehabilitation hospital that she believes may be her last hope. Although she touches on various aspects of her daily existence as a disempowered woman, the central theme is her struggle to be a good mother to the daughter who was only a toddler when disaster struck. She shares her fears about not being able to protect her child from harm, her feelings when she is left behind on father-daughter outings, her joy at finally being able to take her daughter on a simple shopping trip. In the final chapters, ten years have passed and Berger is once again vertical, but it is clear that the horizontal woman she was is forever a part of her persona. Although Berger is a skilled writer, her overuse of italics for emphasis suggests that she doubts her own ability to communicate adequately. She should have more faith: This is a moving testament. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
One ordinary autumn day, Suzanne Berger bent down to pick up her toddler and couldn't get up again. Without warning, something in her lower back had torn, and her life would never be the same. Berger, a prizewinning poet and nonfiction writer, has compiled 28 short but powerful essays into a travelogue of her nine-year journey into the world of disability and back again. Because her injury made sitting painful and walking nearly impossible, she spent the better part of seven years lying down--on the floor, the backseat of the family car, a portable lawn chair while teaching university classes. In stream-of-consciousness fashion, she relates her struggle to stay connected with "normal" society while sinking into bitterness and despair (told by a meditation instructor to pick a two-syllable mantra, she selects the f-word and you). Fiercely personal and yet touching a universal chord, this book will be prized by disabled readers for its eloquence and by the people who care about them for its honesty. June Vigor
Berger, a poet and writer of nonfiction, sustained a severe back injury while lifting her child. She was unable to sit, stand, or walk for several years?hence the title. Here she writes of the unusual perspective she developed on the world: chopping vegetables while lying on the floor and watching her child's school play from a mat near the stage. She describes chronic pain; feelings of anger, guilt, and inadequacy at being unable to participate fully as a wife and mother; the slow rehabilitation process; and her eventual return to mobility. Although intensely personal and very well written, this book is less compelling than Lois Keith's What Happened to You? Writings by Disabled Women (New, 1996). An optional purchase.?Barbara M. Bibel, Oakland P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
