Book Review

In The Body Alone, Nina Lohman doesn’t shrink from the conundrum inherent in writing a memoir of chronic pain: “I need more words because none of these do the work I need them to,” she tells us. “Nothing, it seems, not my brightest words, not your sincerest empathy, communicates my inner world to your outer world.” This, of course, is true of all writing: language can’t render experience with complete accuracy. To get close, it must rely on metaphors, on minutiae, on the receiver’s aforementioned empathy.

But to her profound credit, Lohman keeps trying. There is a linear story here, but it’s simple: one day, Lohman got a headache, and more than a decade later, that headache has mostly remained, forging an unexpected fork in her life and in her relationships. “My life, my worldview, my body, my dreams have all changed because of pain,” she writes. And this, true to the book’s subtitle, is the heart of The Body Alone: it’s a “lyrical articulation of chronic pain,” and if the actual story here is simple, Lohman’s investigation of the fallout is not. It’s complex and nuanced. It’s angry, and it’s heartbreaking; it’s also gorgeous both as a reading experience and as a physical book.

This investigation is, fittingly enough, multidisciplinary in feel. We get medical reports and lists, ruminations on the history of pain management—or its lack for underrepresented populations—and inventories on what Lohman’s pain is not (“It’s not in my hair. My fingernails are fine.”) Medical letters become erasure poetry, and the internal monologues of peripheral characters are hypothesized. Sometimes, divisions bleed and lyricism overtakes science; at one point, we get an inventory of love—an impossible undertaking if ever there was one. Lohman asks us to inhabit our own bodies as we read, inviting us to imagine her manipulating our heads and necks as if we were the patient sitting on crinkling exam-table paper. Lohman’s liberal use of white space tells its own story about inhabiting a liminal space. Through it all, she persists in asking: “How much pain can you handle?”

Within the search for answers to her pain, Lohman considers how it is that we cope with uncertainty and with the unknown. “We name the pigments that create our world,” she writes. “We named grief (Cerulean). We named status (Tyrian Purple). These pigments tell the story of history, the history of art.” Similarly, Lohman ponders classifications as a way to make sense of an essentially mysterious world, imposing order so that “[w]ords belong to each other.” A theologian, she reminds us that the story of Adam and Eve begins with God naming the world into being; it ends with Eve’s legacy to humankind, the consequential punishment—pain.

This, then, feels like the memoir’s true project: not to convince us that the pain is real or that it hurts (Lohman achieves this early on), but to show us how unknowable we’ve allowed pain without purpose to remain. It’s tempting to believe it doesn’t exist—until you experience it yourself, that is—and to let it stay on the fringes of our shared understanding. Give it an ice pack and hope for the best. It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere: how are we to make sense of such a thing?

And so Lohman returns to language, that inadequate tool that is also our best means of transcending what we can’t understand. As she tries and tries again, approaching her pain from every angle—in poetry, in science, in history, in faith—we feel her exhaustion. We share her frustration (still no diagnosis?). We lament her worry for her children growing up with a mother who must sometimes retreat into a darkened room, who loses a partner in part because he and Lohman “don’t outnumber [the pain] anymore.” The pain doesn’t have a discernible cause but is instead purely a cause in itself. In a world of reason and consequence where “[w]ords belong to each other,” what are we to make of this break in causation’s chain?

The answer, at least for Lohman, is an articulation of what remains. Her pain is not a color; it is not a classification. Its history is unknown, as too many histories are. It’s not, for better or worse, a satisfying diagnosis. But it is something, and this matters, and so she names it. She tells its story and, in doing so, reclaims her own. In Lohman’s hands, that story is a powerful mix of hope and mourning and acceptance and fury. The pain isn’t beautiful; the articulation of it, however, is. And that is where the transcendence of The Body Alone lies.