The Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile
by Suzanne Berger
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Book Summary Information
Author: Suzanne BergerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-08-23
ISBN: 0395726689
Number of pages: 216
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Summary of The Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile
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 aPoet Suzanne E. Berger's life was dramatically and horrifyingly changed when she bent to pick up her child and something at the base of her spine tore so out of joint that she collapsed "like a puppet unstrung." The problem was never clearly pinned down, but Berger was: she spent the next six years flat on her back until she was finally able to move and sit by herself. This is the anguished story of her plight, of the torments and conflicted feelings she bore, and of her concerns for her child and family. In this chronicle she successfully communicates the pain--physical and emotional--that she faced as a "horizonatal woman."
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