She describes waking to find her frame cobbled together and held in place by a man-made exoskeleton: “My mouth was full of metal, arch bars that ran from side to side to keep the roof of my mouth from caving in-somehow the bits of bone that had been my chin were pinned together, as were other bones in my face-and I wore a very high, tight, and rigid cervical collar around my neck. Instead, she focusses in brutal detail on the pain of her post-accident body-of finding her sphere of movement and sensation contracted down to almost nothing-and on the slow, excruciating process of navigating her quadriplegic body’s new limits. (The titles of Christopher Reeve’s memoirs, “Still Me,” and “Nothing is Impossible,” reflect the genre’s prevailing tone.) Crosby, by contrast, resists any impulse to impart lessons, shrugging off the narrative arc that “carries the troubled subject through painful trials to livable accommodations … and all too often sounds the note triumphant.” Such books tend to convey uplifting messages, turning the disabled body into an illustration of why readers should make the most of every day or overcome adversities in their own lives through tales of hope or inspiration, they aim to give value to lives that might otherwise seem damaged beyond repair.

The broken bone scraped my spinal cord, and in an instant I was paralyzed.”Ĭrosby, who is a professor of English and Gender, Feminist, and Sexuality studies, and a scholar of the Victorian novel, describes how most accounts of trauma and recovery “answer to the dictates of the realist consensus”: once the writer’s life has been split wide open, the task of such memoirs is to stitch it back together in ways that make it seem deep, complex, self-contained, and goal-oriented. “My chin took the full force of the blow, which smashed my face and broke the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae in my neck. “I caught a branch in the spokes of the front wheel,” she writes. Her new memoir, “A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain,” is an attempt to reckon with the accident that followed.

In October of that year, shortly after her fiftieth birthday, she went out one afternoon for her usual post-work bike ride. In 2003, Christina Crosby was a healthy and successful professor at Wesleyan University, living an active life with her partner, Janet, and their dog, Babe.

A Body, Undone by Christina Crosby