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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

BODY UNDONE. Living On After Great Pain

Christina Crosby

A Body Undone chronicles a 2003 bike accident that left Crosby quadriplegic at age 50, and its harrowing, grueling aftermath.
In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed.

In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation.

Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of "diving into the wreck" of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.
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Published 2016-03-01 by NYU Press

Comments

"[A Body, Undone] is fascinating and painful, humiliating and beautiful...There's no bitterness in these pages, no anger at the action that led to her injury." Read more...

"Part grueling diary of living with chronic pain and part celebration of survival, this is a complicated understanding of what it means to change your definition of living while living through it."

"Crosby discusses her reality with a candor that must be experienced to be believed. And the reader is left to face the truth that one's embodiment and the world that goes with it) can change utterly and forever, in a heartbeat." Read more...

Your Puny, Vulnerable Self Read more...

Joanna Bourke on a memoir focusing on secrets, grief and desire following a life-changing accident Read more...

"Our sense of ourselves cannot exist outside our bodies. As such, Crosby's act of writing the body is a powerful act of self-preservation." Read more...

"A potent memoir that rips open a most human heart."

"Yet, in her surgically incisive descriptions of how it feels to live in her ravaged body and to redefine herself within extreme new limits, Crosby resists both self-pity and the too-easy narrative of hardship overcome. Instead, she asks readers to recognize how messy, precarious, and queer, in every sense of the word, life in a body can be." Read more...