The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves

"In the neurological memoir The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, Hustvedt takes us on her personal journey as she tries to unravel reasons for her tremors (which mostly occur while speaking in public) and to explain the mysterious disconnect between her body and mind. Hustvedt's deeply personal narrative reads at once like a detective novel, a medical history and a scientific critique. Through her own medical mystery, she keeps the reader engaged in the science by drawing connections to fascinating case stories from the medical literature."—Frederik Joelving, Scientific American

"Siri Hustvedt's book is part case study, part detective story. In it she draws on the years of research that went into her novel, The Sorrows of an American (2008), narrated by a psychiatrist . . . Hustvedt's account of the diagnostic mess surrounding puzzling physical symptoms is very accessible. It's also extremely fair-minded, especially regarding psychoanalysis."—Anouchka Grose, Financial Times


"[Hustvedt's] eloquent account flits between philosophy, science and anecdotes from the writing classes she runs for psychiatric patients, as well as her own experiences of those seizures, migraines, voices in her head and a heightened perceptual awareness. Hustvedt explores many gray areas—between mind, brain and body, sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and reality, truth and confabulation. In the process she shows how hard it is to study the mind objectively. How apt, then, that her account is stitched together by a delightfully subjective novelist's pen."—Celeste Biever, New Scientist


"Hustvedt . . . pursues her symptoms with Javertian devotion; her husband, writer Paul Auster, said she was moving beyond devotion into obsession. She read voraciously, attended lectures on brain science, visited a variety of medical and psychological specialists, underwent examinations and MRIs and took drugs. She also ruminated excessively . . . As Hustvedt tries to remember pivotal medical and psychological moments in her life—she heard voices as a child, as did a couple of her sisters, had an early quaking fever, suffered from fierce migraines, tried various drugs—she segues smoothly into a wonderful section about the nature of memory. She also considers dream research and moves steadily toward an integrative theory of personality, concluding that she and her symptoms are not separate. 'Ambiguity does not obey logic,' she states plainly. Self-absorption can be grating in memoirs by lesser writers; in Hustvedt's capable hands, it opens a door to revelation."—Kirkus Reviews

"In this far-roaming neurological memoir, Hustvedt, a writer of psychologically complex fiction, chronicles her quest for a diagnosis after she was seized by powerful convulsions while speaking at a memorial for her father, whose journals shaped her last novel, The Sorrows of an American. With exceptional gifts for translating dense medical discourse into lucid and supple prose and for conducting fierce and revealing analysis, Hustvedt pinpoints the perceptions underlying contradictory theories pertaining to a host of neurological pathologies, from conversion disorder to alien hand syndrome and other eerie mental states that bring into question the very nature of the self. With forays into the dynamics of consciousness and memory, the power of thoughts, and the role of language and narrative in the growth of the psyche, Hustvedt reveals how little we actually know about psychobiological processes and how to distinguish between 'sick minds versus sick brains.' Fizzing with uncommon facts, case studies, and profiles of migraine-afflicted and epileptic writers, Hustvedt's inquiry into some of the most baffling aspects of human life is graceful, intense, and curiously affirming."—Donna Seaman, Booklist

"Novelist Hustvedt (The Sorrows of an American) has been puzzling for years over the cause of her physical distress, from migraines to convulsions, and in this wide-ranging hodgepodge of technical jargon, research, memory and narrative, she tries to get at the root of what ails her . . . The more she delved, the more fractured the possibilities of explanation, as the self has many facets, conscious and otherwise, similar to the voices in a novel she might write. Indeed, Hustvedt's probing of the question 'What happened to me?' taps at the source of the creative process, as such famous victims of migraine, epilepsy and bipolar disorder as Dostoyevski and Flaubert have documented. The barest of personal detail holds Hustvedt's narrative together."—Publishers Weekly