Synopses & Reviews
This taut yet lyrical memoir tells of the author’s experience with a baffling illness poised to take her sight, and gives a deeply felt meditation on vulnerability and on what it means to lose the faith you had and find something better.
One day at the end of 2009, during a routine eye exam that Nora Gallagher nearly skipped, her doctor said, “Darn.” Her right optic nerve was inflamed, the cause unknown, a condition that if left untreated would cause her to lose her sight. And so began her departure from ordinary life and her travels in what she calls Oz, the land of the sick. It looks like the world most of us inhabit, she tells us, except that “the furniture is slightly rearranged”: her friends can’t help her, her trusted doctors don’t know what’s wrong, and what faith she has left just won’t cover it. After a year of searching for a diagnosis and treatment, she arrives at the Mayo Clinic and finds a whole town built around Oz.
In the course of her journey, Gallagher encounters inhuman doctors, the modern medical system — in which knowledge takes fifteen years to trickle down — and the strange world that is the famous Mayo Clinic, complete with its grand piano. With unerring candor, and no sentimentality whatsoever, Gallagher describes the unexpected twists and turns of the path she took through a medical mystery and an unfathomably changing life. In doing so, she gives us a singular, luminous map of vulnerability and dark landscapes. “It’s the nature of things to be vulnerable,” Gallagher says. “The disorder is imagining we are not.”
Synopsis
A lyrical and honest portrait of illness and the way it changes life and faith, beautifully told as only Nora Gallagher can.
One day at the end of 2009 during a routine eye exam that Gallagher nearly skipped, her doctor said "Darn." With this single-word utterance began the author's travels in what she came to know as Oz, or the Land of the Sick. Oz looks a great deal like the world most of us inhabit but for the friends who become unrecognizable, the long-trusted doctors who are now questioned, and the faith in God which is forever altered. In describing living through a medical mystery and facing the possible loss of her sight, Gallagher is consistently frank and never offers false sentimentality. This book is an exquisite road map for piloting dark landscapes.
About the Author
Nora Gallagher is the author of
Changing Light, Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith, and
Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and
Moments of Grace. Her essays, book reviews, and journalism
have appeared in
The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, DoubleTake, and
Mother Jones, among other publications. She is also the editor
of the award-winning
Notes from the Field, a collection of literary essays about the
outdoors. She sits on the advisory board of the Yale Divinity School.