Polly Atkin, Some of Us Just Fall
"This book is for everyone who has been told they are not broken, when they are holding up their bodies full of cracks as evidence." (p55)
The whole time I was reading Polly Atkin's memoir-ish Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better, I felt a little like a spell had been cast over me, so deeply did I find myself embedded in these pages, and so difficult did I find it to rouse myself into whatever else I've needed to be doing.
Even if none of the book's overt content seems to apply to you, I've no idea how a reader could come away from this book unaffected.
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| Image a screenshot from Atkin's own site |
If all of that's not enough to attract you, it's also about time and how we experience our lives, in particular through the lens of chronicity. This means we follow closely the path or progress of Atkin's bodily existence--you could call it "illness" or "symptomology" or something, but those aren't the point--as well as the catalogue of medical interventions, many of them doomed or failed, that follow. It's not a narrative, exactly, even though there is a trajectory to the book, so much as a book-length reflection on a life's moments as experienced through the body.
And if you're someone whose life has been touched by any of these things, especially if you're within the orbit of joint hypermobility, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, or hemachromatosis, Some of Us Just Fall simply must not be missed.
It's not very often that I slam on the brakes while I'm reading, but you only get one chance to read something for the first time. Once in a long time, I want to prolong that experience for as long as I can, and this was one of those rare books. This was at times a challenge, since most of its chapters are around 40 pages in length, each one functioning rather like a standalone piece, like a long essay, but if my first read was going to last more than a few days, it was the only option.
If you're the kind of reader who always wants the book's details, there's a rich summary by Lindsay Johnstone at the Glasgow Review of Books. But the thing is, I don't want you to know very much before you read Some of Us Just Fall. The writing is so good, because Polly Atkin is so intensely thoughtful and grounded in her place and her body, that I just don't see much benefit to the reader of knowing the details in advance.
In brief, Atkin has been diagnosed as an adult--after decades of symptoms, and illness, and varying degrees or shades of disability--with both Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and hemachromatosis. I need to quote her refection on this moment, rather than describe it:
"When I was thirty-four, I was given a diagnosis that changed my entire life, before it, and after it. It made everything after it possible. It made everything before it comprehensible, in a way that had never seemed possible. I could understand my own life, my own body. My own story." (p103)
As she says later on, "To recognise yourself as ill is to meet yourself again, to meet your past self again, with a new understanding, to meet your future self again, with altered expectations" (p144).
Like I said above, I'd rather that readers not know very much about this book before climbing inside, and I'm not going to say more about its details. Just as Atkin's book is about her experience of learning her body through time, your experience of the book needs to occur through time as well.
There are other wonderful books about illness, I'm sure, and Atkin discusses and cites several that sound fascinating, but I've not read myself into that world. (The one major exception has been Elisabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, though after reading Atkin, I'll have to go back and reconsider.) We all make choices, not always for the best reasons or even for conscious reasons, and so I'm new to the genre/mode. Still, I found this volume welcoming, intensely so. That's not just because I've been fortunate enough to cross paths with Polly a few times over the years in our academic lives, and not just because of my own hypermobility/EDS issues or the hemachromatosis that has affected so many of my extended family members. It's because Some of Us Just Fall has been written so very well, with intimacy and research and insight.
And so I'm not saying more about its details, but before closing, I need to speak to an un-ease that hits me sometimes while writing about all these books.
Every so often, the cycle of book-review discourse returns once again to that particular season for throwing shade: discourse about mean reviews, or why to ignore books, or the pointlessness of positivity (or negativity), and I've no choice but to play meme-Homer and back away through a hedge.
At bottom, generally I don't read books that I don't want to read unless the Beer & Books book club makes me (which does happen at times. It's good for me). When the discourse comes round again on the guitar about when and how to be harsh about books, and folks get to singing it with harmony and feeling, at first I feel a bit badly for not being a genuine book reviewer, but inevitably--and more quickly every time now--the feeling passes.
Why should I read books that I won't like? And if I don't like one, why would I bother putting in the energy to explain why, when I could be spending the same time reading something else that I'd like better?
And so yes, absolutely I tend to be positive about the books I review here, because I self-select for books I'm going to be tempted to love.
Even so, although this here blog shows me professing my love for a great many books, some of them stand out. Polly Atkin's Some of Us Just Fall is the newest stand-out, and though some elements of its subject aren't things I've read much about, I found it astonishing.
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