A Body, Undone
eBook - ePub

A Body, Undone

Living On After Great Pain

  1. 208 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

A Body, Undone

Living On After Great Pain

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access A Body, Undone by Christina Crosby in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Medicine Biographies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

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