Darcey Steinke wanted to write a book that wasn’t just about trying to get over pain. Her memoir, This Is the Door, explores how chronic pain changes us
Chronic pain has a way of upending a life.
In her memoir This Is the Door, writer Darcey Steinke writes that “pain, like failure, breaks into our everyday lives and upsets who we thought we were and what we thought we could do”.
In her case, excruciating pain from a herniated disc forced a multitude of changes – sitting down hurt so much that she “basically had to stand up all day long”, she says. Emotionally, it was a rollercoaster: “I was roiling, anxious, fragmented,” she writes.
Steinke, who has written books including Suicide Blonde, Up Through the Water (Jacqueline Onassis was her editor) and Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life, wanted to investigate others’ experiences of pain, posting signs up in her neighborhood and soliciting interviews with friends. From conversations with about 80 people, and research about the history and artifacts of pain – rare 17th-century books, the cadavers analyzed by anatomy students – she distilled a series of reflections on pain’s effects.
