The Body Alone is an inquiry into the experience, meaning, and articulation of pain. It is a personal hybrid account incorporating research, scholarship, and memoir to examine chronic pain through the multi-lens of medicine, theology, and philosophy. Broken bodies tell broken stories. Nina Lohman’s pain experience is portrayed through a cyclical narrative of primers, vocabulary lessons, prescription records, and hypothesized internal monologues—fractured not for the sake of experimentation but because the story itself demands it. In both form and content, The Body Alone represents boundary-pressing work that subverts the traditional narrative by putting pressure on the medical, cultural, and political systems that impact women’s access to fair and equal healthcare. This is more than an illness narrative, it is a battle cry demanding change.
“The Body Alone is a moving book debut with a lyrical meditation on the 'land of in-between,' an invisible kingdom between sickness and wellness that Lohman has inhabited since 2007. . . . All facets of her identity—wife and mother, friend and coworker—have been changed by her pain. If theologians see pain as 'a portal to the divine,' Lohman has come to see it as complex and contradictory, with the potential to incite creativity—and, as her elegant prose attests, even beauty. A graceful memoir of suffering and coping.”—Kirkus, starred review
“This is not a book about pain—it’s a journey into the heart of it. By taking readers through her own experience placed thoughtfully within the context of literature and science, Lohman’s story will resonate with those living in the land of pain and serve as a primer for those who have not ventured into it—yet.”—Abby Norman, author, Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain
“This book is a searching inventory of a life altered by pain, punctuated with forays into history, etymology, theology, and poetics. It’s a stubborn, tender record of the unrecordable, a brave attempt to describe something that cannot ever be truly communicated. A beautiful howl of a book.”—Jordan Kisner, author, Thin Places: Essays from In Between
