Was her body speaking?

Arya Samuelson


Neuroplasticity – the brain’s capacity for regeneration – operates as the core metaphor of Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: “The stroke changed my brain, which changed my mind, which then changed me” (49). In the years following her stroke, Christine’s brain is healing itself, even when she does not consciously perceive herself as making any cognitive progress. In this sense, the resilience of the brain mirrors the resilience of the spirit when confronted with trauma. At the onset, the possibilities for healing and transformation seem unthinkable; and yet, resilience is our innate capacity, always inside of us, at work in ways we may not even notice. As she begins to listen to her body instead of “ignoring [its] needs,” she began “valuing [her] body for its resilience and strength,” and by extension she asserts: “I began to value my own resilience and strength” (202).

The tensions between the brain, mind, and body are central to the narrative. In one section, the author discusses the ways the mind often chooses the brain over the body, deciding instead to punish and mistrust the body for its primal desires and deficits:

 “The girl is trying to find power. The problem is her mind, she thinks. The problem is that everyone else can exercise to exhaustion and she cannot. The problem is that she must not be strong enough in mind. The problem is her body. Her body must be ignored. Pain must be ignored. The mind must override everything. The mind has decided to punish the body. She will starve her body. She will purge her body. Her mind will count every calorie that is eaten” (73).

In this way, Christine acknowledges that she had trained herself to be concerned exclusively with the achievements of her brain – her grades, the shrewdness of her intelligence, her perfectionism in every sphere of her life – especially those that overrule the (perceived) deficiencies of her body. Initially, the author believes that memory is a function of the brain. She discusses taking “great pride in [her] superior memory,” which manifested as her ability to remember men’s credit card numbers, strangers’ faces and names, and chemistry textbook pages (44). Her pride in her memory, as the author initially relates to it, represents her absolute determination to trust her brain – what it can consciously remember, organize, and analyze – rather than the seemingly more primitive wisdom of her emotions or her body.

 Once the author can no longer access memory in these ways, she begins to recognize the various levels and layers of memories.  There is not one type of memory, she realizes, and furthermore: there is memory that inhabits the body, beyond that which can be consciously perceived. The author describes driving herself home, and calling her husband, in the first weeks after the stroke as implicit, or nondeclarative memory – her body knows what to do, even if she cannot consciously narrate or explain what she is doing: “This nondeclarative memory drove me through recovery, though I did not know it at the time. All the lessons of my life to date came to light. This kind of memory retained all the things I knew how to do deep in my bones and helped me navigate a landscape in which I was otherwise lost” (70).

Despite these assertions, I feel like the book is somehow missing a body. I cannot picture the author’s body. I am not present with the author’s body as she moves through the world of this book. Or, I am present with her body as plot or even as theme, but not with the immediacy of sensation that to me characterizes “writing from the body.” The author states that she never really liked her body and mainly talks about her body throughout recovery in terms of what it can no longer do. She refers to learning to trust her body, but it feels abstract, removed, from her own body. She talks about her emotions during recovery using language like “anger,” “sadness,” “hurt” – emotions divorced of their corporeal impact. I recognize these blog posts aren’t about whether we like or dislike a book, but I was disappointed to read these lines again and again, as they undercut so much of the richness and potency of the transformation she is describing.  Recounting her blog posts during the first stage of recovery, she writes: “My internal editor was turned off. I wanted to scream out into the void, but eloquent words were gone, so what I screamed was guttural and primal and it turned out, my truest emotions, untouched by judgment and ordered thinking. It was my body speaking” (85). This is what I found myself craving – her body to speak, guttural, primal, untouched, unordered – but this is precisely what I found lacking.

She acknowledges there are places narrative cannot touch. On the way to the hospital following the stroke: “And eventually my thoughts subsided. All of them. My brain went... quiet. Dark.” She describes those early weeks as lived “entirely in the present tense, unleashed from the part of [her] brain capable of worry and anxiety and fear and strategy and power” (108). I love this notion of a “present tense” and I believe in its capacity to unearth powerful, embodied language, even in a memoir relayed in past tense. However, the author consistently analyzes these present-tense moments: “I didn’t know how to say that everything tasted bland. That a bowl of rice tasted the same as a fried egg as a pancake. That I could see they were different foods, but the memories associated with each thing were gone. That the flavors were no longer meaningful or unique. That the flavors were no longer connected to my emotional center – that I no longer had favorite foods. That I no longer had food preferences” (17).

Rather than the “present tense” she references on page 108, she is analyzing her experience on the page. For me, these moments dilute the emotional potency of what she is describing. I am interested in her entering into that state of everything tasting the same, rather than standing outside of it telling me with her now-rational mind what it was like. This was a deliberate choice she made as an author; all memoir writers must ask: from what temporality am I narrating the story? How is the self narrating the story a character? While she talks about the primal place of language, of non-sense-making, it doesn’t feel like she is writing from that place. It feels like she is stitching the story together from notes, from memories, and weaving now into a coherent, if circular and non-chronological narrative. As she weaves in and out of the past, “present” and future, it’s her relentless analysis and the vague, often clinical nature of so much of her emotional language that ends up flattening the narrative, rather than powerfully conveying her psychological state.