If you are familiar with her earlier writings, she lived something of a hand-to-mouth existence at one time. It is questions like these that Eula Biss explores in this new collection of essays under similar circumstances.

Shortly after moving, my wife and I were walking in the neighborhood, and she asked me, “did we sell out?” We had just moved to a new city, moving from an older, inner ring, blue collar suburb in one city to a three year old housing development on the very edge of our new city, with twice the square footage of house and lot. Summary: A collection of essays on the occasion of the author and her husband buying their first house, considering the nature of capitalism, consumption, work, and class. In bringing an ostensibly crip methodology to bear on readings of chronic pain, I hope to invigorate discussions on reading, writing and knowing chronic pain in the critical medical humanities.Having and Being Had, Eula Biss.

Rather than bowing to the impulse to impose false coherence on my reading of Biss and Huber, my article foregrounds the impact of the re-reading, misreading, cognitive dissonance and breaks necessitated by chronic pain and processing delays on this analysis. The article’s analysis draws on my personal experience of chronic pain, neurodivergence and disability to demonstrate the generativity of an embodied approach to literary analysis. For Biss, this surfaces as a quiet critique of numbers and a disturbance of their fixity, while Huber’s criticism employs the motif of pain’s legibility across multiple bodies to spell out alternative meanings of chronic pain.Ĭrucially, this article proposes a crip and embodied approach for reading and responding to accounts of chronic pain’s measurement, including Biss’ and Huber’s literary accounts, and the biomedical account of pains scales which this article reads alongside them. Considering both texts as cripistemologies of chronic pain, my literary analysis attends to their criticism of the pain scale, including its implicit reliance on imagination and memory, and how its unidimensionality and synchronic focus prove inadequate for lasting pain.

Establishing first a brief history of methods attempting to quantify pain before my close reading, I read both Biss’ and Huber’s accounts as performative explorations of the limitations of using linear pain scales for pain which is recursive and enduring. This article analyses the literary representation of pain scales and assessment in two chronic pain narratives: ‘The Pain Scale’, a lyric essay by Eula Biss, and essays from Sonya Huber’s collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System.

Having and being had by eula biss