Imagine a house whose wiring is spliced and patchy with knob and tube, coiled like a serpent ready to strike and spark at any moment. Even if you have a fire trap behind your walls, the lights will turn on. In her memoir of a life lived in physical pain, Karen Engle asks whether and how language can capture what it’s like to be in a body that appears to work from the outside, when its internal systems operate through an ad hoc assemblage of garbled messaging, reroutings, and shaky foundations.

“When Karen Engle writes her somatic experience of living in her chronically ailing body, or about her experience of medical treatment, she is writing a remarkably expressive and articulate memoir about a life with chronic illness.” – G. Thomas Couser, Hofstra University and author of Signifying Bodies: Disability and Contemporary Life Writing