The Shaking Woman, or a History of My Nerves, By Siri Hustvedt

Making sense of a disrupted self

In Siri Hustvedt's 'Memories of the Future', male oppression of women is the overarching theme (EPA)

More than two years after her father died, the novelist Siri Hustvedt was giving a talk at a memorial service on the college campus where he taught.

Before the end of her opening sentence, she began to shake violently. Her voice wasn't affected, but she was having a seizure. Subsequent tests showed no signs of epilepsy, so what caused the attack?

In The Shaking Woman, Hustvedt delves into current neurological and psychiatric theories and practices, and reveals how much, and how little, we know about the brain. From explorations of the word "hysteria" through Jacques Lacan's "mirror stage" to post-traumatic stress disorder, Hustvedt explores the ways we try to make sense of ourselves. Nothing disrupts our sense of our identity quite so much as sudden illness or dysfunction, and as a writer who holds classes in psychiatric hospitals, believing that learning how to construct narratives helps, Hustvedt understands this disruption better than most.

This is an elegant, clear and wide-ranging book that may be motivated by the personal but rarely remains there. Hustvedt makes a narrative of her own experience, not to push it away from herself and take refuge in theories and philosophies, but to try and reclaim it; to restore a sense of her self. "I am the shaking woman," she insists at the end. Whatever else she and others can claim to know about her condition, they at least know that much.