The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves

While speaking at a memorial event for her father, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. She managed to finish her talk and the paroxysms stopped, but not for good. Again and again she found herself a victim of the shudders. What had happened?Chronicling her search for the shaking woman, Hustvedt takes the reader on a journey into contemporary psychiatry, neurology and psychoanalysis. She unearths stories and theories from the annals of medical history, literature and philosophy, and delves into her own past. In the process, she raises fundamental questions: what is the relationship between mind and body? How do we remember? What is the self?In a seamless synthesis of personal experience and extensive research, Hustvedt conveys the often frightening mysteries of illness and the complexities of diagnosis. As engaging as it is thought-provoking, The Shaking Woman brilliantly illuminates the age-old dilemma of the mental and the physical, and what it means to be human.

Siri Hustvedt is the author of four novels, THE BLINDFOLD, THE ENCHANTMENT OF LILY DAHL, WHAT I LOVED and THE SORROWS OF AN AMERICAN, as well as a poetry collection, Reading to You, and three collections of essays, Yonder, Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting and A PLEA FOR EROS. Born and raised in Minnesota, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.