One of Ms. Magazine's Top Feminist Books of 2024
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鈥檚 pain experience is portrayed through a cyclical narrative of primers, vocabulary lessons, prescription records, and hypothesized internal monologues鈥攆ractured 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鈥檚 access to fair and equal healthcare. This is more than an illness narrative, it is a battle cry demanding change.
鈥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鈥攚ife and mother, friend and coworker鈥攈ave 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鈥攁nd, as her elegant prose attests, even beauty. A graceful memoir of suffering and coping.鈥濃Kirkus, starred review
鈥淭his is not a book about pain鈥攊t鈥檚 a journey into the heart of it. By taking readers through her own experience placed thoughtfully within the context of literature and science, Lohman鈥檚 story will resonate with those living in the land of pain and serve as a primer for those who have not ventured into it鈥攜et.鈥濃擜bby Norman, author, Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women鈥檚 Pain
鈥淭his book is a searching inventory of a life altered by pain, punctuated with forays into history, etymology, theology, and poetics. It鈥檚 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.鈥濃擩ordan Kisner, author, Thin Places: Essays from In Between
鈥淓loquent, compelling, memorable, candid, insightful, informative, thoughtful, and thought-provoking, The Body Alone is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and college/university library Pain Management collections and supplemental Chronic Pain curriculum studies lists.鈥濃Midwest Book Review
鈥. . . this book is all encompassing. It has to be. To fully articulate that which has no prior definitions鈥攖o make sense of a pain that no one else, professional or otherwise, can quantify鈥攈as to come from a place that is as exhaustive as it is deeply personal. The Body Alone is that and all of the above.鈥濃Little Village
鈥淕orgeous both as a reading experience and as a physical book. . . . In Lohman鈥檚 hands, her pain鈥檚 story is a powerful mix of hope and mourning and acceptance and fury. The pain isn鈥檛 beautiful; the articulation of it, however, is. And that is where the transcendence of The Body Alone&苍产蝉辫;濒颈别蝉.鈥浓赌Colorado Review
