"Joy Sorman's Life Sciences takes an overtly political premise--the
medical establishment's inability or perhaps refusal to take seriously
the physical struggles of women--and transforms it into a surreal and
knife-deep work of fiction that asks: What pain can we abide, and what
pain must we fight back against, even if the fight hurts more than the
disease itself?" --Lena Dunham, The New York Times Book Review,
Editors' Choice
Ninon Moise is cursed. So is her mother Esther, as was every eldest
female member of her family going back to the Middle Ages. Each
generation is marked by a uniquely obscure disease, illness, or
ailment--one of her ancestors was patient zero in the sixteenth-century
dancing plague of Strasbourg, while Esther has a degenerative eye
disease. Ninon grows up comforted and fascinated by the recitation of
these bizarre, inexplicable medical mysteries, forewarned that something
will happen to her, yet entirely unprepared for how it will alter her
life. Her own entry into this litany of maladies appears one morning in
the form of an excruciating burning sensation on her skin, from her
wrists to her shoulders.
Embarking on a dizzying and frustrating cycle of doctors, specialists,
procedures, needles, scans, and therapists, seventeen-year-old Ninon
becomes consumed by her need to receive a diagnosis and find a cure for
her ailment. She seeks to break the curse and reclaim her body by any
means necessary, through increasing isolation and failed treatment after
failed treatment, even as her life falls apart. A provocative and
empathic questioning of illness, remedy, transmission, and health, Life
Sciences poignantly questions our reliance upon science, despite its
limitations, to provide all the answers.
