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    What Her Body Thought: A Journey Into the Shadows
    Unavailable
    What Her Body Thought: A Journey Into the Shadows
    Unavailable
    What Her Body Thought: A Journey Into the Shadows
    Ebook368 pages4 hours

    What Her Body Thought: A Journey Into the Shadows

    By Susan Griffin

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 28, 2011
    ISBN9780062094346
    Unavailable
    What Her Body Thought: A Journey Into the Shadows
    Author

    Susan Griffin

    Susan Griffin is an award-winning poet, essayist, and playwright who has written nineteen books, including A Chorus of Stones, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as a New York Times Notable Book. Her groundbreaking Woman and Nature is the classic work that inspired ecofeminism. Named one of the top one hundred visionaries of the new millennium by Utne Reader, Griffin is the recipient of an Emmy Award for her play Voices, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a MacArthur Grant for Peace and International Cooperation. In 2009 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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    Reviews for What Her Body Thought

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      An okay book; I see where Griffin was trying to go, making links between illness, poverty, and a bunch of other topics, but in some ways, it felt like she was trying to make too many links and not being terribly explicit about it. There were some beautifully written parts I had to read aloud, but not really something I would say "You HAVE to read this."