NOVELIST Siri Hustvedt was giving a talk in honour of her late father when the “speechless alien” first attacked. “My arms flapped. My knees knocked… It appeared as if some unknown force had suddenly taken over my body,” she writes. The seizures have struck many times since, inspiring Hustvedt to try to understand the mind.
Her eloquent account flits between philosophy, science and anecdotes from the writing classes she runs for psychiatric patients, as well as her own experiences of those seizures, migraines, voices in her head and a heightened perceptual awareness.
Hustvedt explores many grey areas – between mind, brain and body, sleep and wakefulness, consciousness and reality, truth and confabulation. In the process she shows how hard it is to study the mind objectively. How apt, then, that her account is stitched together by a delightfully subjective novelist’s pen.
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The Shaking Woman
Sceptre