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Carol Lee wakes one morning to find her body null and void. Her head is as ‘heavy as a waterlogged football’ atop a body of separate pieces that her useless spine cannot coordinate. Trapped in a ‘cage of pain’, a few hours later she is attacked by ‘electric shocks’ shooting through her arms - the ‘big guns’. So she describes the literally shocking beginning to her illness. She has to give up work and become a tenant in her own house - an uneasy parallel to the tenancy her mind now has in her body. After some aborted treatments and learning to sit so perfectly still that she can't feel the pain, she writes;
Now, the outside of me, where my skin meets the world, is as far away as the top of a wave is to the seabed. I've gone and arrived at the same time. I'm relieved, first of all, to be rid of the pain, and also afraid. If this is madness will I find my way back? But it can't be. Madness is bedlam, chaos betrayal and this isn't. I have arrived, at last, at the bottom of myself, a place so vast you would never want to be on top again. It's limitless and here, on the ocean floor, sorrow and grief have no place. Nor the woman who typed a thousand words before breakfast. (p. 28)
This is fine writing. I'm not making a gratuitous point, for her book is as much about her formation as a writer as it is the journey of discovery to the source of her illness. Friends introduce her to the osteopath Renzo Molinari who sets her on the path of psychic enquiry through reliving her childhood. Interspliced with her autobiography is a superb account of how writing helped her survive a childhood lived through the emotional fallout of a World War Two fighter pilot father, a passive, unprotecting mother and a damaged grandmother. Her head ‘a den of secret resistance’, she used and developed language to control her world and protect her from her father and his evocation of a controlling, punishing God (for whom she wanted to be a good girl). So the buckling of a little girl's spirit and the