Caren Beilin

an incredible little book about the various ways we confront family trauma. in combining the everday conviviality of Cookie Mueller with the more lucid surrealities of William S Burroughs, Caren Beilin rises above mere affectation and makes the vulgarities and absurdities an integral part of the narrative.

I read this in the middle of the night, my hands bound up in braces, almost unable to hold the pain that grasping a book can sometimes ask of me.

And in it, I found such affirmation in Beilin's crystalline declarative truth of what it is to be a woman experiencing healthcare systems.

But amongst all the pain of diagnosis and feeling let down by the people who were supposed to heal you, Beilin gives hope. Through the stories of other women coming together, to the clarity of new studies, and show more most striking to me, in her third rheumatologist.

"But I was crying. It was me who was crying, walking home, because he'd said, "I need to hear your whole story. I don't trust doctors, inherently, so I need to hear it, as length, from you." And still I didn't tell him, about the IUD at least. But I cried on my way home, gingerly across the bridge and in the blatant October lighting, to be asked."

I wanted to cry along with her to hear that the paranoia is grounded in truth. I'm so glad for that third, "just right" goldilocks doctor.

Thank you Caren and to all the other amazing passionate women working to ensure this hurt doesn't happen to anyone else! Books like this are a lifeline. show less

Funny & surreal but I don’t think I totally got it lol. 3.5 stars:)

"I want to nothing more than to channel classic Beat culture and I really, really like the nostalgic iconography of Budweiser." - Skogman, probably