Imagine a house whose wiring is spliced and patchy with knob and tube, coiled like a serpent ready to strike and spark at any moment. Even if you have a fire trap behind your walls, the lights will turn on. In her memoir of a life lived in physical pain, Karen Engle asks whether and how language can capture what it’s like to be in a body that appears to work from the outside, when its internal systems operate through an ad hoc assemblage of garbled messaging, reroutings, and shaky foundations.

A series of narrative reflections capture the myriad ways in which the chronic conditions its suffering subject. Contrary to claims that pain obliterates language – long a trope of writing about illness – Engle contends that the person with chronic pain is not hampered by a scarcity of language, but rather its excess: enervation by the unending waves of utterance. From a history of the word chronic and its shifting significance to meditations on multiple diagnoses and interactions with medical personnel, Chronic Conditions is a doctor’s case file through the looking glass of a creative writer, scholar, and patient. Engle explores, through medical research, literature, and art, how it feels to become attuned to the rhythms of perpetual and mysterious physical pain.

At stake here is the search for a kind of writing that does not instrumentalize pain for allegorical or transcendental purposes. Chronic pain is not a sign of weakness, nor is it an opportunity for personal growth, Engle argues. Instead, it is entirely ordinary and deeply affecting.

Karen Engle is associate professor in visual culture at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Windsor and the author of Seeing Ghosts: 9/11 and the Visual Imagination.

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“When Karen Engle writes her somatic experience of living in her chronically ailing body, or about her experience of medical treatment, she is writing a remarkably expressive and articulate memoir about a life with chronic illness.” G. Thomas Couser, Hofstra University and author of Signifying Bodies: Disability and Contemporary Life Writing

“In Chronic Conditions, Karen Engle has attempted to explain, express, and normalize what it means to live with chronic pain and illness. This story takes you on a journey of discovery, one which will help you better understand and respect those around you who are living with chronic illness.” Miramichi Reader