Emma recommends... |This is the Door: Notes from a Body in Pain - Darcey Steinke

Emma says... This is one of those books that defies categorization by blending memoir, creative mediation, and factual investigation. Darcey doesn't only recount her own experience of back pain and heartache, and of supporting members of her family through the pain of illness and injury, but interweaves this experience with reflections on her research into medical history and science, over 80 interviews, and the examples of artists and creatives like Frida Kahlo and Kurt Cobain, and thinkers and writers like Simone Weil and Friedrich Nietzsche. The key shift here compared with other pain memoirs is that the focus is not on finding the cure, on getting free of the pain, but on the experience of the pain itself, on inhabiting and exploring pain, and - while not glorifying suffering - celebrating how bodies can endure, and what humans can create through pain to provide relief both for themselves and for others.

Darcey Steinke will be at Collected, in conversation about This is the Door on Wednesday 20 May. Get your tickets for the event here.

---

In This Is the Door, acclaimed author Darcey Steinke explores the agony and ecstasy of pain in its many forms. She takes readers through the archives and across oceans; she walks the tightrope between suffering and rapture, explores her own pain and that of a multitude of creatives characters from Frida Kahlo to Kurt Cobain. Her journey reveals a series of questions. Does pain educate? Is pain always a physical experience of negation? How does pain push us to another level of creativity? What can we learn from wounding, from winnowing, from the stillness, the de-creation that intense pain brings?

Whether it is the physical pain of an injury or illness, or the mental pain of heartache or loneliness, pain is an experience shared by all of us. This Is the Door is a celebration of what the body can endure, and what it can achieve.