Such books tend to convey uplifting messages, turning the disabled body into an illustration of why readers should make the most of every day or overcome adversities in their own lives through tales of hope or inspiration, they aim to give value to lives that might otherwise seem damaged beyond repair. The broken bone scraped my spinal cord, and in an instant I was paralyzed.”Ĭrosby, who is a professor of English and Gender, Feminist, and Sexuality studies, and a scholar of the Victorian novel, describes how most accounts of trauma and recovery “answer to the dictates of the realist consensus”: once the writer’s life has been split wide open, the task of such memoirs is to stitch it back together in ways that make it seem deep, complex, self-contained, and goal-oriented. “My chin took the full force of the blow, which smashed my face and broke the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae in my neck. “I caught a branch in the spokes of the front wheel,” she writes. Her new memoir, “A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain,” is an attempt to reckon with the accident that followed. In October of that year, shortly after her fiftieth birthday, she went out one afternoon for her usual post-work bike ride. In 2003, Christina Crosby was a healthy and successful professor at Wesleyan University, living an active life with her partner, Janet, and their dog, Babe.
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