The Unpredictable Body (& What It Has to Do With Writing)

on the literary lessons of the chronically ill body

I began a draft of this post months ago and pulled it back out of my archives to finish this morning; I am not currently in NYC, but the intent behind this piece remains the same.

There’s a tour group (happily, noisily) going through The Drama Book Shop at the moment, which is where I’m working until I meet with my Riverhead editor for the first time; we’ll be having lunch not far from here. It took me ages to dig myself out of my depressing hotel room so that I could manage the four-minute walk to this considerably more pleasant location.

Here follows the text conversation that C and I had this morning, which I think is indicative of how hard I find it to get my body moving anywhere a lot of the time:

Me: I bet I can go there and work
Me: It’s a four-minute walk away

[One minute later]

Me: Now that I’ve decided I want to go to this bookstore that’s a literal four-minute walk away, I feel exhausted at the idea

And this, my friends, is one of many reasons that I find life in a corporeal body to be an endless slog.

It did not help my morning circumstance that I’d just woken from a dream in which I was in an even gloomier version of the hotel room that I’m staying in at present, and in the dream, I was suffering from a high fever that made it impossible to think straight or exist in my body without wanting to hurl myself unconscious against the nearest wall. I’ve flown (pre-Covid) from Wyoming to San Francisco with a 103.2 F fever; it’s not that I haven’t managed deep physical discomfort on my travels. In fact, if I try to recall most trips, it’s rare that I soar through them without trouble. But sometimes it’s the vaguer, less-than-hellish states of being that are harder to navigate—such as wanting my body to feel just a little bit better before getting dressed and walking four minutes to the Drama Book Shop.