The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves: Book summary and reviews of The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt

The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves Summary

While speaking at a memorial event for her father in 2006, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. Despite her flapping arms and shaking legs, she continued to speak clearly and was able to finish her speech. It was as if she had suddenly become two people: a calm orator and a shuddering wreck. Then the seizures happened again and again. The Shaking Woman tracks Hustvedt's search for a diagnosis, one that takes her inside the thought processes of several scientific disciplines, each one of which offers a distinct perspective on her paroxysms but no ready solution. In the process, she finds herself entangled in fundamental questions: What is the relationship between brain and mind? How do we remember? What is the self?

During her investigations, Hustvedt joins a discussion group in which neurologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and brain scientists trade ideas to develop a new field: neuropsychoanalysis. She volunteers as a writing teacher for psychiatric in-patients at the Payne Whitney clinic in New York City and unearths precedents in medical history that illuminate the origins of and shifts in our theories about the mind-body problem. In The Shaking Woman, Hustvedt synthesizes her experience and research into a compelling mystery: Who is the shaking woman? In the end, the story she tells becomes, in the words of George Makari, author of Revolution in Mind, "a brilliant illumination for us all."

The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves Reviews

"The barest of personal detail holds Hustvedt's narrative together, in favor of a dryly detailed academic treatise on etiology that is by turns elucidating and tedious." - Publishers Weekly

"Self-absorption can be grating in memoirs by lesser writers; in Hustvedt's capable hands, it opens a door to revelation." - Kirkus Reviews

"This is a work of dizzying intensity ... eloquent and vivid." - Don DeLillo

The information about The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves shown above was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's online-magazine that keeps our members abreast of notable and high-profile books publishing in the coming weeks. In most cases, the reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author of this book and feel that the reviews shown do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, please send us a message with the mainstream media reviews that you would like to see added.

The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves Reader Reviews

Click here and be the first to review this book!

Siri Hustvedt Author Biography

Siri Hustvedt is the author of The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl and The Summer Without Men as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster. Visit her website at www.SiriHustvedt.net.

Other books by Siri Hustvedt at BookBrowse