| Chapter 4: | The Beginnings of Dys-Girl's Body |
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The Beginnings
of Dys-girl's Body
The personal essay, like the best literary journalism, brings the writer into the writing where she must bear witness: the use of “we,” the active, the agent, replaces the passive voice so common in traditional scholarly writing. The personal essay invites poetic language, calls for metaphor and detail. Data appear in the form of critical incidents, stories, and anecdotes; and narrative can be linear, in montage, segmented, fractured…During the writing of the inquiry the writer is explicitly inside the text; she is both agent and subject.
—Neilsen (1998, pp. 278–279)
Twenty-six surgeries, three deaths, two martinis, and another mammogram later…
Yeah. The deaths are my own. Real deaths. Not the metaphorical kind. I've had lots of those. But the real ones. Ya can't get used to those.
I've lived 45 years in this body. My idea of normal for this body is different from others. At 19, I was cast from my body, died in a car accident. Was revived only to die again and again. One time, they gave me blood not typed to match my own. Next time, they gave me an anaesthetic that