Book review: “The Body Alone” by Nina Lohman

The body alone (University of Iowa Press) is all-encompassing. Nina Lohman’s memoir describes itself as “…a lyrical, nonfictional investigation into the experience, meaning, and articulation of pain.” This articulation comes at the reader from all directions. Yes, there are first-hand accounts from Lohman that one would expect from something like a traditional memoir. But there are also forms that are in edgethe hybrid and cross-genre literary magazine that Lohman founded in spring 2021.

There are reshuffled and jumbled medical classifications; sanitized letters from doctors become edited pieces of black-out poems, and vocabulary lessons provide definitions of phantom words. In a feat of literary mastery, all these extrapolations seem necessary, one of the common threads of The body alone is the inadequacy of language to describe a persistent and puzzling struggle with chronic pain.

Reading this book will get you as far behind the Cliffs Notes version of Lohman’s pain as possible. There are several passages where I had to wince at the sensory descriptions.

As is often the case with autobiographical accounts, the story runs counter to typical narrative threads. (Woe betide the reader who expects a well-connected story in three acts as #summerreading.) Let me be clear, this is not a mistake. On the contrary, in many ways this subversion of our formal expectations The body alone’s greatest strength.

For example: After years of pain and years of searching for possible cures, Lohman becomes pregnant with her first child. I’m not proud to admit that there was a small part of me, that tiny inkling, that thought that maybe this pregnancy would somehow ease that person’s pain. That notion was no doubt fed by my implicit biases both as a man and as a consumer of media inundated with stories about the virtue and redemption of motherhood. Lohman herself brings up and refutes that notion in one of the vocabulary lessons mentioned above. The lesson: “I want a word for the polite smile I offer when people suggest Maybe pregnancy will cure your headache.”

Used in a sentence:
She __ because it’s rude to say “fuck you” to a complete stranger.

A key goal of the book is to bring to light the systemic medical, social and theological issues facing women, from doctors’ disregard for a woman’s pain to the philosophical implications of original sin as represented by Adam and Eve.

It’s a lot. As I said at the beginning, this book is all-encompassing. It has to be. To fully express something for which there are no predefined definitions – to make sense of a pain that no one else, professional or otherwise, can quantify – you have to start from a place that is as comprehensive as it is deeply personal. The body alone is that and all of the above. It may not offer the catharsis that the average booktoker expects, but that speaks to Lohman’s ability to tell a story that still resonates.

This article was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Little Village.