Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

As someone that suffers from chronic pain I found this book to be helpful and easy to connect with. I think there is a stigma to people that have an invisible illness like pain and books like this, with people expressing what they are going through and how they have to deal with this on an every day basis are very helpful and important. More people need to understand that invisible illness is a real thing even though it cannot be seen through a microscope or perceived with the naked eye. I could identify so much with many of the stories throughout this book. I will be reading this again and recommending this on my channel when it gets a little closer to publication date as I have many subscribers that also suffer from chronic illness and I think reading a book like this will help to give them some comfort to know that they are not alone. I know it did for me.

Stunning. Fabulous. Eloquent. Truthful.

This is a tour de force describing what it's like to live with constant pain. For those who live with it, I can't recommend it strongly enough. It acknowledges the emotions that come with coping, day after day after day. I recognized and deeply related to the weird emotional convolutions that we go through to make sense of something that ultimately doesn't make sense. This is book of emotion, not self-help

I don't know how this will read to those who don't live with pain. I hope it gives you insight, but I genuinely don't know. I'll be giving it friends soon, and find out.

The book is a series of essays that are lyrical, and almost ecstatic descriptions of living in pain. The writing is beautiful, and almost too much to bear. Here's a quote that gives a flavor of the book, and deals with the duality of living in pain. The author is talking about how her writing has changed since her health has changed.

"Pain Woman has stuff to tell you, and she has one minute to do so before she's too tired. Pain Woman knows things.
My non-pain voice searches for metaphors to entertain you. She aims to fascinate with far-reaching, pretty, solar-system curlicues, hiding behind constructions that allow you to forget for a second that you are even looking at a woman at all.
Pain Woman steals your keys, and drives away."

There's little in between in this book. If you like it you'll really like. If not... well

I initially decided to pick this one up because I read a great review on Bitch Media by Gila Lyons (https://bitchmedia.org/article/pain-woman-takes-your-keys-review-sonya-huber-chronic-pain) & I was instantly captivated by the cover - I loved the bright colours & how the triangles made a pattern on the page.

I'm not sure what exactly I expecting going into this book as I knew basically nothing about chronic pain, but I absolutely loved reading this & probably took a bit longer than usual to finish it because I didn't want it to be over. This isn't a feel good book - though it did make me pause & think about appreciating my young & able body while I can because I won't always have it - but I loved Sonya Huber's voice & the way she chronicles her life with pain & her discussion on pain itself.

I highlighted so many passages while reading this & I feel like I need to go over my favourite parts again [the first entry, "What Pain Wants" is one I can see myself coming back to over & over again] because there is so many things that I loved about this book that should be highlighted, but because I never make it to the end of long reviews, I am going to end it here by simply saying this is one of the best nonfiction books on a subject that I don't know much about that I have read in a long time, & if this sounds like something you would like then you should go read it immediately.

I would recommend this to those who are looking for a book dealing with health issues/chronic pain but I also think this would appeal to a wider audience of those who enjoy reading memoir like books / essay collections of other peoples lives as well.

This is one of those books whose title immediately grabed me - I mean, it is just super brilliant. And lenghty parts of this collection of essays are brilliant as well. Sonya Huber writes about her struggle with chronic pain; she has an auto-immune disease that changed everything about her life. As somebody who also struggles with pain on a regular basis I could relate so much to the way she talks about her pain. She is impressively eloquent and has a brilliant way with metaphors. The parts where she directly addresses her anthropomorphized pain were absolutely stunning and illuminating. Here she really shines and these parts I adored.

I also appreciate the honesty with which she approaches her life and her pain and her limitations thats result from that pain; we need voices who are honest before everything and who show that there are different ways of living ones life without being patronizing.

But while I really appreciated parts of this book, overall there were issues for me. You can definitely tell that the essays were written and published seperately before; Sonya Huber repeats things a lot and the repetitiveness of this work did not always work for me. Even within the essays themselves, her style is mostly disjointed - this type of literary non-fiction is difficult to pull of. Oftentimes she excels but sometimes it fell flat for me and the non-sequitors made following her train of thought difficult. I think I would have appreciated this a lot more if the whole book had been one overarching essay - then the repetitiveness and the circularity of some of her arguments could have worked beautifully.

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I received an arc of this book curtesy of NetGalley and University of Nebraska Press in exchange for an honest review. Thanks for that!

I knew from the opening lines of the first essay, Pain Bows in Greeting, that I would like this collection.

"Pain wants you to put in earplugs because sounds are grating. Pain has something urgent to tell you but forgets over and over again what it was.
Pain tells you to put your laptop in the refrigerator.
Pain runs into walls at forty-five-degree angels and ricochets back into the center of the room."

The essays range widely from the near poetry of the above to magazine-type explorations of what it means to live with pain. Some spin out metaphors.

"Pain twists me like the ends of a Halls cough drop wrapper. A few cunning turns transform a flat square of wax paper into a neat home for a lozenge. If I do not unroll pain, I carry it."

All are fascinating. Huber tells us what it's like to watch your body slowly decline, to mourn the healthy body you've left behind, to try and explain and quantify your pain in just the right way to doctors and specialists. You're frustrated in reducing your pain to a number on a ten point scale. You underestimate it so you're not labeled as a drug seeker. When yet another person suggests that doing yoga would help, you read "the implication: if you tried harder, you could fix it."

It's a window into life with pain that I'm grateful to have. As a medical interpreter I feel better armed to assist patients who are in chronic pain themselves. I also feel like I have the tools to be a better human. A theme that has come up in my reading this year is that when someone tells you their story, listen. Believe them. Huber gives you no other choice.

I like some essays more than others, but it's still an easy recommend to anyone who works with or knows someone in chronic pain, or just wants a beautifully written peek into that world.

Being a chronic pain sufferer myself I thought the author did an excellent job in describing what it's like and all of the frustrations that come with it.