Siri Hustvedt (4-20-2010)

This Lit Show features Siri Hustvedt, author of The Shaking Woman, or, A History of my Nerves. The book, a memoir, tells the story of the author’s experience with a strange, undiagnosable illness: from time to time, and mostly while speaking in public, Hustvedt has experienced fits of violent, uncontrollable shaking. These are not conventional seizures, however. When she shakes, the author remains fully conscious and cogent, able to address and engage entire auditoriums full of people—even as her limbs struggle to grip the podium. This uncanny divorcement between self and symptom—or, in the author’s language, between Siri Hustvedt and “the shaking woman”—catalyzed this book, which both is a scholarly attempt to reason the cause and implications of her condition, and an account of her relevant personal history. As Hustvedt seeks to define her experience in terms of current psychological, philosophical, and neurological literature, she undertakes a personal journey into the most perpetual human questions about identity, grief, trauma, and memory.