striking memoir of an incredible odyssey

books:

	• The Body Broken: A Memoir Lynne Greenberg Random House, 2009 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Need all the info

An agonizing, but very helpful account of a life played out in the context of chronic pain. If you or anyone you know lives with excruciating pain from a neck or back injury, then this book is MUST reading for a fresh perspective on how to reclaim your life. Had the book listed ALL the resources used,(including the brand name of the orthopedic pillow and the name of the long term hospital that helped Lynne withdraw from the meds) I would have awarded it 5 stars. If the pillow is helpful enough to carry it everywhere, then it is information that anyone with this type injury can use. Ditto for the long term hospital.

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Pure Poetry

I've read a number of headache books and patient memoirs, but not one of them has been anything like Lynne Greenberg's The Body Broken.

Twenty-two years after a seemingly miraculous full recovery from breaking her neck in a car accident, Lynne Greenberg was struck with a severe headache that has not gone away since. In The Body Broken she chronicles her experience with this unrelenting headache in a way only an English professor could, a fact that for better or worse was never far from the front of my mind as I read her story.

Before her pain forced her to stop working, Greenberg taught and wrote about seventeenth-century British literature. She was in the process of writing a book about John Milton when she stopped working. She uses passages from his most famous work Paradise Lost and from other favorite works of literature as a framework for telling her own story.

My favorite portions of her book are those in which she is brutally honest about the ways in which her pain has distanced her from her children and the emotional pain her situation has caused them, particularly her daughter Lilly. Knowing how much guilt is often associated with being sick, I believe she must be an incredibly strong woman to face down the way her illness has shaped her relationship with her children without flinching.

Greenberg likens her situation to Adam & Eve and Paradise Lost. The idea of punishment resonates with me. I have always viewed my migraine attacks as punishment for something, never knowing what. As a kid I always secretly wondered what I'd done to deserve this kind of suffering.

Chronic pain patients will find themselves nodding along and perhaps even reliving their own journeys as Greenberg traverses the process of trying to find the right care provider and treatment plan. They will relate to the fear and anxiety of trying to decide which path to take at a fork in the road and the difficulty of trusting doctors once you've been around the block and back.

At the end of the book she includes an appendix of some of the poetry that helps her cope with her situation. These works are a beautiful end to the story she tells and far from being an unrelated extra provide another window into how she views herself and her pain. I'm not especially fond of poetry, but I can imagine that a reader who is will find much comfort in the poems she selected for inclusion.

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good informative book

This is a good but sad book how hard it is for people who have to wrestle
chronic pain.It also highlights how some doctors are eager to subscribe pain killers without any idea weather it will help or cause other problems
(addiction) to the people they are treating.

Honest Account of a Chronic Illness

Twenty two years after Lynne Greenberg thought she had walked away unscathed from the neck fracture she sustained at age nineteen, her ordeal came roaring back when she learned that her neck was still broken. According to Greenberg, "in the breath of a moment, I could see that my life had fractured in two as clearly as had my fractured neck."

The Body Broken details Greenberg's coming to terms with a serious debilitating condition. She doesn't pull punches as to the depths of her pain. During the summer of 2006, while in London researching for a literary criticism book, Greenberg suddenly experienced an intense headache that "has never gone away since." Greenberg's memoir explores her descent into the abyss of chronic pain, drug dependence, and despair.

Along with her story Greenberg, an English professor, weaves in pertinent poetry quotes such as this one from Mark Strand's Precious Little

". . . and nothing turns out

As you thought, then what is the difference

Between blindness lost and blindness regained."

The ending is not a "feel good one" at least in the sense of being healed. Rather it is the triumph of learning to live a full life in the face of a constant challenge (chronic pain). As Greenberg poignantly explains "in November 2007, one year and five months after my life changed, I got out of bed. Such a simple act in so many ways, so ordinary, it required just a little shift of my thinking the morning it happened. I think I'll take Lil to school today and have coffee at Starbucks with my friends, I thought. In other ways, it was a momentous shift."

The Body Broken is a compelling read, especially for anyone who has ever experienced a serious illness or been a caretaker to someone with a chronic illness.

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striking memoir of an incredible odyssey

As a teen author Lynne Greenberg narrowly survived a car crash that left her with a broken neck, which healed. Years later the pain returned and introduced to her chronic illness, a web of specialists, and a medical system unable to handle chronic pain patients. A striking memoir of an incredible odyssey which evolves over twenty years after a devastating crash.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

In the tradition of William Styron?s tour de force Darkness Visible, The Body Broken is a gorgeously told and intensely moving account of one woman?s extraordinary odyssey into a life of chronic pain?and of the unyielding resilience of the human spirit.

At age nineteen, Lynne Greenberg narrowly survived a devastating car crash. When her broken neck healed?or so everyone thought?her recovery was hailed as a medical miracle and she returned to normal life. Years later, she seemed to have it all: a loving husband, two wonderful children, a peaceful home, and a richly satisfying job as a tenured poetry professor. Then, one morning, this blissful façade shattered?the pain in her neck returned in the most vicious way. A life with physical agony ensued.

Greenberg realized that she had been living for years on borrowed time. As she and her family navigated an increasingly complicated web of doctors and specialists, Greenberg taught herself to fight her own battles?against a medical system ill-equipped to handle patients with chronic pain, and against the emotional pitfalls of a newly restricted life. Drawing on her family?s support, her own indomitable spirit, and an intense connection to the poetry she taught, Greenberg found the strength to return to a productive and satisfying?if irrevocably changed?life. This deeply personal saga takes us to the heart of a family?s struggle to survive a crisis, and shows us how, at the most profound levels, such an odyssey affects a patient?s marriage, the ability to parent, family, work, and friendships.

The Body Broken is a powerful, lyrical story of one woman?s remarkable determination and breathtaking courage, as she puts mind over matter in the struggle to reclaim her life.

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