A Body, Undone

A “transformative” memoir “about a calamitous accident. . . . also about the accident of all our lives, and the . . . mortality that informs every one of our days” (Los Angeles Review of Books).

In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of one thousand miles for the riding season. She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. In that instant, she was paralyzed.

In A Body, Undone, Crosby writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. She recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and growing up during the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation.

Deeply unsentimental, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire.

“An extraordinary and luminous book.” —Judith Butler, author of Precarious Life

“Tender, fierce, and eloquent.” —Laura S. Levitt, author of American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust

“[Crosby] asks readers to recognize how messy, precarious, and queer, in every sense of the word, life in a body can be.” —The NewYorker.com

“Elegant and harrowing.” —The Washington Post