Christina Crosby (1953–2021)

I whizzed through this book. The first sentence gives away the fact that the author is a 50 year old academic who has a catastrophic cycling accident resulting in a broken neck and paralysis. This story is her journey of her recovery, if you could call it that, to the point where she can function as well as is possible. The theme of the book is grief- for the life she has lost, and also grief for the loss of her family, whose deaths have left her with a complicated set of feelings and memories. It is also the story of her pain, which continues to this day and is described exquisitely. I can imagine some readers might have been frustrated with the tangents that the book takes into the past, or into the development of academic ideas, but I liked wandering along with the author's thought train.

So although it made forays into various academic areas such as feminism, gender, literature, sexuality, and even broached some epistemological and phenomenological issues, it treaded those particular boards relatively lightly and challenged me just enough theoretically. I was particularly interested in reading about her relationship: how it was, how it evolved, and how changed after the accident.… (más)