A body in pain navigates the world

There are voices to which attention is paid, and there are voices that are shunted to the side. The absence of women’s voices from the annals of history, science, poetry, and nearly every other field is news to almost no one. The genre of memoir, however, has been claimed by women—and particularly by White, middle-aged, educated women—following the success of Eliza­beth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. Some of these memoirs are hilarious, insightful, and gripping. Others should have called it quits at being a magazine piece.

Molly McCully Brown has written a humdinger of a memoir: a collection of essays that amply display her skill with poetry as they tell the story of her body in the world and reflect on how this body and its experiences have formed her. In sharing these thoughts and words, she offers precise, evocative, attention-grabbing images of what it means to navigate a world that didn’t think of your needs when it constructed itself.

Brown, she tells us, was born prematurely at a scant 27 weeks. Her chances weren’t good. Her twin sister, Frances (a “small, heated weight [that] is hanging in the air . . . another heartbeat at the furthest edge of your hearing”), died after 36 hours. Brown survived and has lived her whole life with cerebral palsy as a result of oxygen deprivation at birth.