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New Release:
The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Melanie Thernstrom is now available for purchase.
Description:
Each of us will know physical pain in our lives, but none of us knows when it will come or how long it will stay. Today as much as 10 percent of the population of the United States suffers from chronic pain. It is more widespread, misdiagnosed, and undertreated than any major disease. While recent research has shown that pain produces pathological changes to the brain and spinal cord, many doctors and patients still labor under misguided cultural notions and outdated scientific dogmas that prevent proper treatment, to devastating effect.
In The Pain Chronicles, a singular and deeply humane work, Melanie Thernstrom traces conceptions of pain throughout the ages—from ancient Babylonian pain-banishing spells to modern brain imaging—to reveal the elusive, mysterious nature of pain itself. Interweaving first-person reflections on her own battle with chronic pain, incisive reportage from leading-edge pain clinics and medical research, and insights from a wide range of disciplines—science, history, religion, philosophy, anthropology, literature, and art—Thernstrom shows that when dealing with pain we are neither as advanced as we imagine nor as helpless as we may fear.
Both a personal meditation and an intellectual exploration, The Pain Chronicles illuminates and makes sense of the all-too-human experience of pain—and confronts with extraordinary grace and empathy its peculiar traits, its harrowing effects, and its various antidotes.
Review:
“But memoir is a subjective form that chooses its own territory and doesn’t claim to cover all the bases. What counts is the narrator’s voice, interests and sensibility. Melanie Thernstrom is such an engaging and intelligent writer that I remained intrigued with her investigation even as I disagreed with some of her reportorial choices. I cheered as she disentangled romantic from physical pain and found a caring partner. I was dismayed to discover that she found no remedy and that, for the time being, she and millions of others will continue to suffer from chronic pain.”–Helen Epstein for the New York Times
About the Author:
Melanie Thernstrom is the author of two books: the best-selling memoir The Dead Girl (Pocket, 1990) and Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder (Doubleday, 1997). The Dead Girl—originally written as Melanie’s senior thesis at Harvard University, titled Mistakes of Metaphor—is an account of the disappearance and murder of her best friend Bibi Lee. Halfway Heaven—the story of a murder-suicide of two students at Harvard University—began as an article for The New Yorker. It explores murder from the point of view of the killer, based on diaries discovered after the deaths.
A Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine, Melanie has reported on subjects as diverse as high-end matchmaking, mediated divorce, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, medicine, and fugitives. She has also written for Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal, Food and Wine, Travel+Leisure, Elle, and other publications. She has taught creative writing at Harvard University, Cornell University, and in the MFA program at University of California at Irvine. She has received fellowships from the corporation of Yaddo, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
She lives with her husband and baby twins, Violet and Kieran, near Portland, Oregon and in New York City.
Image credit IndieBound.
