Molly McCully Brown has cerebral palsy, “which is a little like a stroke that happens when you are born” as she has to explain nearly every day to someone, somewhere. In Places I’ve Taken My Body, a collection of personal essays and her third book, she reveals her incessant, conflicted relationship with the body that she has carried since birth through to maturity as an accomplished poet, author and professor at Kenyon College. Several of these essays have been published elsewhere, but as collected set they provide an overlapping, ongoing conversation between body and voice that invites us into the experience of living a life in which the body can never be taken for granted.

The seventeen essays in the collection contemplate daily life that demands she accept the limitations that her cerebral palsy dictates on her ability to walk and maintain balance. Her life has been broken into four distinct epochs defined by her broken body: the original body before medical interventions, the body after extensive spinal surgery as a child, the body that by revolted during puberty, and her now slowly aging body that she believes will never improve. Woven across recollections of these epochs are seminal life events, including the loss of her twin sister shortly after birth, surgeries and terrifying medical interventions of various types, new academic and professional opportunities, deaths of family members, successes and failures. These essays were clearly written independently as basic introductory and situational information is often reiterated, but together the quilting of the essays creates a rich, multidimensional discussion into the nature of embodiment of self, voice and passion filtered through her uncooperative physicality.

As she moves through her many travels fueled by an urge to challenge her body’s literal limits, she grapples with identity as defined by her disability. She lays bare her grief and rage with the injustice of it all. She cannot escape her body, and sometimes does not even know if she wants to, but yet... all life must be experienced through the discolored lens of her body defined by medical lexicon and the disability politics she wants to shed. She is hindered by “this sense that I have to pay so much attention to my body, the ground right in front of me.” (pg.18) The necessary hyper-focus on the body creates physical and emotional barriers that impair her ability to enjoy what she achieves. This grief weighs heavily over us as readers. We feel her frustration at being moored to the earth while she wants to float free.

Ms. Brown’s collection of essays is a deep and graceful contemplation of her ongoing search for a stable identity that is powerful and authentic. She has her broken body, “I have needed fixing from the moment I was born. I can feel myself falling apart.” (pg. 81), but desperately does not want this body to define her, all the while honestly acknowledging the myriad ways it does. Ms. Brown is generous and forgiving of those who initially see only her body, including those doctors and surgeons who treat her over the years, and hardest on herself for wanting to deny that body.

“…I put on a nice dress and went to a bar I don’t usually frequent, but that I knew was accessible. I parked my Segway against the back wall and chose a table close enough that I could see it, but far enough away that it wasn’t obviously mine. I sat in the semi-dark and drank a bourbon, and enjoyed the thought that, looking at me, nobody would know that sitting at the table right now I could be any pretty young woman with a book in a bar. For all they knew, I could go dance. I could get up and walk right out of there, painless and fluid and unremarkable. I wouldn’t need to field a single comment or question, or get a single sorry look.
This lasted a few minutes, and then I felt guilty as hell for trying to crawl out of my skin.” (pg.88)

The collection includes “Bent Body, Lamb,” which is an elegant description of the comfort she has found in Catholicism, despite the paradox of not being able to partake in the rituals of mass due to her physical limitations. She identifies with the broken figure of Christ on the cross which highlights the mutual necessity of body and self. This is the strongest free-standing piece of the collection, and was very well received when published in Image Journal for its unfiltered exposure of her confrontation with God at the injustice of her reality paired with a path forward to hope and resolution. She concludes quite beautifully with “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” (pg. 45) Is this not what everyone searches, regardless of the packaging we carry?

While these essays were not necessarily intended for a healthcare readership, I will be recommending this as necessary reading for my trainees in Neurology from now on. The totality of the overlapping essays crossing time and space provide a moving and powerful narrative of the lived experience of a patient who always demands to be more than a patient. —Lara K. Ronan

Lara Ronan, MD is an Associate Professor of Neurology and Medicine at Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College and Vice-Chair for Education in the Department of Neurology at Dartmouth Hitchcock in Lebanon, NH. She directs the DH Neurology Residency Program and has research interests in the intersection between the Arts and Humanities and Medicine. She is currently completing the Columbia Narrative Medicine Certificate Program and writing about the effects of individual narratives on the telling of the legacy of a single story.