A Body, Undone

Living On After Great Pain

Christina Crosby

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781479853168
  9781479833535
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479861682
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A woman's fight to reclaim her body after a paralysis-inducing cycling accident

In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed.

In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation.

Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of "diving into the wreck" of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Your Puny, Vulnerable Self
• 2. The Event as It Was Told Me
• 3. Bewilderment
• 4. Falling into Hell
• 5. Caring at the Cash Nexus
• 6. Lost in Space
• 7. Masculine, Feminine, or Fourth of July
• 8. Time Held Me Green and Dying
• 9. Jefferson Clark Crosby
• 10. Violence and the Sacred
• 11. Bowels Lead
• 12. I’m Your Physical Lover
• 13. Supply and Demand
• 14. Shameless Hussy, Babe D., Moxie Doxie
• 15. Anabaptist Reformations
• 16. Pretty, Witty, and Gay
• 17. The Horror! The Horror!
• 18. Living On
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author