Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System

“If this isn’t the book that we in the pain community need in 2017, I don’t know what is.”-Matt Mendenhall, Pain-Free Living Magazine

“The theorist Elaine Scarry, in her magnum opus The Body in Pain, writes, ‘The utter rigidity of pain itself is that its resistance to language is not simply one of its incidental or accidental tributes but is essential to what it is.’ One can see Sonya Huber’s Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System as a glorious refusal of what Scarry puts forth. With ardor and valor, Huber renders the lived experience of chronic pain and all that attends it in a language all her own, written-as she so wonderfully phrases it-using ‘pain’s alphabet.’ These essays make imprecision their enemy as they comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Pain Woman further establishes Sonya Huber as one of the most exciting voices writing creative nonfiction today.” -Vincent Scarpa, Electric Literature “Sonya Huber has restored my faith in chronic illness narratives… . Now, if I have my way, this book will sneak its way into the lives of many future readers, regardless of their personal experience with chronic illness.”-Taylor Wilke, Rumpus “Sonya Huber works magic by articulating the indescribable. With her lyrically written and witty account, she better describes her own pain experience than a patient rating scale of 1 to 10 ever could.”-Paula Kamen, author of All in My Head “This is an important book, a necessary book, a book that, in the right hands, could change how our medical establishment deals with pain. These essays are at once vulnerable and fierce, funny and smart, unflinching and dappled with stunning metaphor.”-Gayle Brandeis, author of Fruitflesh “Huber has captured what it is to be a woman who lives with chronic pain in all its nuanced complexity.”-Sarah Einstein, author of Mot: A Memoir