How much pain can you handle? This is a question that Nina Lohman asks readers of The Body Alone, her upcoming book set to release July 3 with The University of Iowa Press.
The question above comes up repeatedly in Lohman’s book. Sometimes a whole page will be blank save that one simple, barbarous inquiry, framed by the emptiness around it. (Subtitled A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain, this is not the only way this hybrid work plays with form.) The Body Alone explores every facet of this pain question, as the author, with no prior history of health issues, began to experience chronic headaches that have stayed with her in the decades since.
Little Village spoke with Nina Lohman in anticipation of her book release. The conversation was a big one, hitting on everything from the limits of traditional language to articulate her experience to what she hopes different readers will take away from the questions her book proposes.
Lohman will read from the book at Prairie Lights on Friday, June 21 at 7 p.m.
The book is going to come out soon. What’s the feeling like in your world right now?
I’m excited. I’ve been working on this project for such a long time. Rather quietly. It was difficult to publish bits and pieces of this book, because it’s hard to break it apart. It’s hard to get the feel of it and communicate a story in a piece that would be published. So it’s mostly just lived in my computer, in my brain, in my writing group and with a few trusted readers. I’m really looking forward to getting it out into the world and letting other people see it, hopefully relate to it and have a good experience with the book itself. I think I’m ready.
How long have you been working on it? How long has this been existing as a project that you’re sitting down to?
Probably about eight years? I didn’t know that I was writing a book when I started. I had had some traumatic experiences in medical settings and I was trying to get those out of my body and onto the page. I was looking for catharsis. I thought I was just writing some things down, in the same way that you write a grocery list if it’s in your head and you can’t go to sleep, you just get it out. But then it started to form into something else and there started to be these other voices. In the course of those eight years it has looked really different. This is my first book and I’m fairly sure I did it all backwards. It was about six or seven years into it, like, maybe I should make an outline? [laughs] It just evolved and evolved and evolved. It’s a very unconventional book in the way that it chooses to tell the story that it tells. That was both very easy to do and very complicated to do.
Was there ever a moment when you thought it should be more of a traditional narrative with “characters,” or did it always feel like it should exist in this more lyrical hybrid approach?
I tried writing essays. When I thought, hey, maybe this is a little more than me exorcising these bad experiences from my body. Maybe there is an essay in here, or a couple of essays, maybe this is even a book of essays. Let’s try. And I tried and tried and I just couldn’t get the stories to fit in the essay. They refused to go. But it felt very clear to me early on that the form of the story mattered as much as the story itself. That has stayed throughout and the way that I use these different voices, or these different narratives, all of the different patterns and ways that the story is told, that feels like the experience, like you’re trying to piece this thing together. Sometimes there are adjacent jumps and sometimes there are these hard stops and there’s no words, the vocabulary is missing for us. It felt really important to me to underscore and strengthen the work by making sure that the form really upheld the story itself.
This is something I hope is not true but I’m imagining it. There’s all of these pieces where different doctors tell you something and they’re very curt. And now you have this book. Are you worried that the literary scene will give you their version of, “Hey, have you tried this ice pack?” Giving you their suggestions or what you need to think about, etc.?
Not yet, but I am preparing myself for that to come. It’s a tricky balance because I know in my heart that those often come from very good places. From wanting to help or wanting to offer a piece of knowledge or insight and information. And at the same time there are certain people who have earned the right to give me their recommendations or give me their advice.
I’m writing about pain and I still have pain, I am still living in this. It requires both empathy from me and a resolution in myself to be able to know like, OK, there are people who can suggest and others who can not. And to be fair, I had a physical therapy appointment. It was a new clinic and it’s always a vulnerable thing to have to start a new round or route of treatment when you have chronic pain. And I explained everything, my situation, and she said, “Oh we’ll have this fixed up in like two or three sessions. It’ll be fine.” And it was such a terrible thing to say because I knew that there was no way that she was going to undo 16 years worth of pain and problems in three visits. Yet there’s this teeny tiny little part of me that feels hopeful like maybe this is going to be the one.
It’s hard to always have this posture that’s both nurturing and hopeful and expectant, but also guarded. That’s one of the strange and trying parts of this situation.
There’s something you did beautifully, you navigated those expectations I had as a reader. Life doesn’t come in three acts. You say in the beginning, “This is circuitous. There is no ending.” Have you had any experiences of readers wanting something like a resolution? Did you think about that kind of framing when you wrote it?
The first thing that comes to mind is the pacing and being aware early on that I needed to give people something to show movement and progression of time. That’s where those treatment records come in, like, two years in, four years in and six years — to show this marker of time that things are changing. When I started writing this project, it was my experiences, it was what I was dealing with trying to understand my pain, my body.
And over the course of eight years, it really went from gosh, all these doctors look at me and say, “We don’t know what to do with you, you’re such an anomaly. We can’t understand this,” to at the end saying, now hold on a minute. I’m not an anomaly. There are 50 million Americans like me, most of them are younger, most of them identify as women or have female sex parts. There’s a system problem here. This is systematic, this isn’t me, I am not the problem. For so long, I thought I was the problem. If there is any type of resolution, it is this understanding and this uncovering of, hold on, it’s not me, there are so many other forces at play here that we need to be discussing.
You talk about this concept, the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick — how there can be this assumption or privilege of not having to question the healthcare professionals in your life. And when that suddenly gets yanked away from you how alienating and scary that is. It reminded me a lot of the pandemic when all of a sudden, the folks that we could look up to for expert advice, they had no idea either, right? Did you notice those parallels?
I absolutely did. There was a lot of chatter online about people who live in compromised bodies, or who live with chronic pain, who are like, “This is it. This is what we live with all the time.” Not in a way that was intending to be shaming, but in a way of, “Oh, now you see what it feels like to not be able to make plans, to have to cancel, to always be worried, to not have answers, not have language, to not know if you can go here or go there.” There was so much about the pandemic we collectively experienced that paralleled what it feels like for a lot of people who live with compromised bodies or in pain. So yeah, absolutely.
To those who haven’t read it yet, can you explain the idea of what it means to need truth and trust when talking about chronic pain?
There have been a lot of attempts over time to find ways to measure the intensity and the level of pain. But we don’t have anything to measure it from person to person or even within one person’s body. To complicate it even more, we don’t have the best language or ways to articulate it. An important part of pain is that it lives in our bodies and it’s beyond articulation. What I’m trying to do is to articulate it. To find language for it. We have to tell the truth about our bodies. We have to trust when other people tell us the truth about their bodies. And we have to trust ourselves as well.
So I’m coming from this as somebody who doesn’t have chronic pain. I’ve already said a couple of times, “oh this reminded me of COVID,” or I couldn’t help but think of what’s the worst pain I’ve ever experienced? and trying to relate like that. But I wrote down the phrase, “the poverty of language,” and that’s such an interesting thing for me as a writer, not being able to articulate it. It really affected me reading this, because I felt some of that pull of trying to apply metaphor.
I think that what you are doing is what I did and what I continue to do. How do we understand this thing that we’ve never had to understand before? That we don’t really have much of a context for understanding? We don’t have a vocabulary for it. We are meaning-seeking people and we are metaphorical people. We try to make sense of things; we have to. That’s how we find resolution of how we allow things to fit into our lives. Your experience parallels what I have done and what I have gone through. That’s what this book is, it’s me saying, “Well, is it this? Is it like this? OK, it’s a little bit like that. But it’s kind of not like that.” It’s this piecing together.
Could you describe the experience of revisiting this pain? It’s such a visceral thing. Is there anything that you have to pay attention to? Or anything that you thought of when you were revisiting these experiences that have been a part of you for so long?
A very wise friend gently cautioned me. He said, “Be careful when it is your subject matter and it is what you’re still living in and experiencing in your life. That’s a lot of pain. That’s a lot of one thing. Take breaks. Make sure you don’t get too close to all of it.”
There were definitely times, whether it was in the writing or the revision process, that I just needed to step away. I’m still living it. The hard part was looking back and not so much specific moments that happened but the length of time or the amount that I have tried. There’s a real grief in looking back at all of that.
The other part of that answer is, there’s really only one other person who has a voice and a section in this, and that’s my co-parent. That’s the “He” sections. I kept trying to write from my memory of what I thought it was like for him, and it didn’t work, and it didn’t work, and it didn’t work. Finally I just called him because we have a good relationship. I asked him if we could talk about what this was like for him. Almost everything in the “He” sections is verbatim quotes from him that he said a few years ago. That was a healing conversation for both of us to look back over this moment.
Towards the tail end of the book, there’s this beautiful moment where you talk about looking for answers and the questions that you’ve been asking yourself for years. And it almost feels like you’re flipping things on its head when you then write, “Who are we looking to for this? Whose questions are we paying attention to?” My question for you is, knowing that this is ongoing and not tied up nicely in a bow, what questions are you asking right now regarding this journey? Who are you looking to?
My next book that I’m writing is a book on release. Which lends itself well because I’m currently trying to learn to let go of some things. One of the things I am doing right now is working with a somatic therapist. We are focusing on the reality that pain lives in your brain. Pain is a function of your brain. So what does that mean for someone who has chronic pain in their body and has had it for a long time? What is happening in there? What is the brain doing? So cognitively, it makes a ton of sense, I understand it. It’s difficult for me to translate that understanding into my body, especially when I am having pain moments.
So I think that’s part of this next stage that I’m in right now. Continuing to talk about all of this provides the opportunity for more people to say, “Oh, yeah actually, me too. I have the same thing, or my sister has that or my daughter has that.” This collective voice really has an opportunity to affect change.
We live in a town that has a teaching university and I am looking forward to ways that this book would be in conversation with the people who are in those doctor’s office rooms with us. There’s a lot of opportunities for correcting what has gone wrong, impressions and misinformation, both swiftly and in certain specific areas with gentleness, because there’s a lot of distrust and actual harm that has been done to people.
