I am so excited to bring you - ahead of time for once - a review of this months Migraine Monologues Book Club reading/viewing courtesy of the lovely Amanda McDonald. Do join us for an on-line discussion this Tuesday 13th. Details below.
This month we've been reading 'On Being Ill' by the illustrious novelist Virginia Woolf, herself a sufferer of migraines, and watching the film 'Love and Other Drugs' - a love story about a young girl with early onset Parkinson's (which is less depressing than it sounds).
Over to Amanda:
Dropping out from the race:
A review of Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Being Ill’
and ‘Love and Other Drugs’ by Amanda McDonald
 |
| The lovely Amanda |
As a former
English literature student and having written my thesis on Woolf, I was quite
excited to be reviewing one of her essays for the Migraine Monologues Book Club.
As someone who also indulges heavily in fluffy movie viewing, I thought it was
going to be an interesting challenge to compare lightweight ‘Love and Other
Drugs’ to migraineur, Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘On Being Ill.’
In fact, despite
the extreme intellectual contrast between the film and the book, one a little
trashy and glossy version of illness, the other an intense and heavyweight
treatise, I was struck by some commonalities between the two.
Most
notably, both referred to the complete alienation of suffering from a chronic
condition, and whilst Anne Hathaway’s Maggie Murdock treats her exile from the
‘normal folk’ of society with acerbic humour and breezy acceptance, Woolf
succumbs to hers with increasing frustration and nihilism. When in the throes
of a migraine, I am sorry to admit that I am definitely more of the ilk of the
latter than the former. Woolf’s powerful language, describing the “wastes and
deserts of the soul” that are brought into view by illness and her description
of the way that ill people go “down into the pit of death and feel the waters
of annihilation close above our heads”, certainly struck more than one chord
with me. As a migraine sufferer for nearly twenty years, I have experienced the
waters of annihilation on many an occasion (normally an occasion that required
me to be alert, intelligible and on top form), and on a few, deeply memorable
occasions, I have genuinely thought, without exaggeration that I was entering
the “pit of death”. Horrifying my friends and husband, I have felt, most
recently on a flight to Spain, that the migraine I was currently engulfed in,
was such a powerful one, that it must surely end in death (it didn’t!). I was
interested to read in the last book we reviewed ‘A Brain Wider than the Sky’ by
Andrew Levy, that migraines can trigger this sensation, and that it is simply
part of the bizarre brain manoeuvres that occur during the headache, and not
some indication that I am a bit of a creepy drama queen.
Interestingly,
Woolf talks about death as a state in which “the body smashes itself to
smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes”. To me, my migraines have
always felt like an assault from within. My body is doing its best to smash me
to smithereens and all I can do is look on hopelessly. When I describe my
migraines, I do often see them as separate from me, a murderous part of me that
delights in attacking my head, my muscles, my nervous system and my digestive
system and unleashes an arsenal of symptoms to try to destroy me (or in fact,
just make that holiday more of a trauma than a retreat, and that business
meeting a superhuman challenge). I therefore understood Woolf’s description of
“those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it” as
representative of the almost daily battles that me and my head are engaged in. In
fact, many of the holistic practitioners I have seen in my endless pursuit of a
cure have tried to get me to embrace
that part of me, to see migraines as a way of protecting me (but I don’t need
to be protected from parties or
holidays I protest!), or railing against my lifestyle (I have been living the moderate,
routine-focused life of a ‘migraine nun’ for twenty years I complain!). One
even asked me to personify the migraine as a dog that needed to be nurtured,
fed and looked after. (I tried really hard, but during the first migraine,
ended up sub-consciously beating the migraine dog to a bloody pulp, so not sure
that worked!). Note: no real dogs were harmed in that psychological experiment.
Anyway, I digress…
On
reflecting on both the film and the essay, I would love to be able to relate to
the cool, frank and accepting Maggie, and tackle my condition with sardonic
humour whilst remaining effortlessly beautiful and admirably stoic. However, truthfully,
I tend to feel more like Woolf, that I’ve “dropped out of the race” and am no
“longer a soldier in the army of the upright”. And, sadly, when in the throes
of migraine-induced misery, I don’t really find myself blessed with a superb
and intuitive grasp of Shakespeare and poetic talent like Woolf, nor do I take
solace, like Maggie does, in self-expression through art. Instead I find myself
groggy, my instincts dulled and my brain capacity diminished (and that’s
without the delightful Topamax). I find that ordinary tasks turn into Krypton
Factor-style challenges, and that my battered brain is swimming in treacle
whilst being repeatedly battered with a claw-hammer. (Woolf wasn’t wrong when
she said that the “poverty of language” can’t describe our condition – we need
a new language – “more primitive, more sensual, more obscene”). And, once you
invite someone into the world of a migraineur, you do feel guilty – like you’re
showing them a side of life that even you would rather not be privy to. Like
Jake Gyllenhaal’s shallow-as-a-teaspoon Jamie Randall, you have to show them a
darker, more shadowy world that at best gives them depth and compassion, at
worst makes you look like a complete freak (anyone else puked in front of a
date, or been found collapsed in a pool of your own vomit, still with
sunglasses and a Kool headpatch on by the side of the road by your boss?)
So did I
learn anything from the book and film? Probably not. However, what I did get
from them was the sense that I am not alone. Although migraine is not a
terminal or degenerative disease like Parkinson’s, it does sledgehammer its way
through your life in a similar, unwelcome and often terrifying manner. It also
creates the same, alienating feeling that Woolf so eloquently describes in her
essay. And, if Virginia Woolf feels that language is inadequate to describe
what she feels, then I certainly won’t feel bad when I try to describe my
migraine like “one of those teddy-grabbing machines in an arcade gone rogue”.
So, all that’s left for me to do now is take up a creative hobby…Wish me luck!
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Thank you Amanda for such a personal, thoughtful and insightful review. I'm looking forward to picking your brains more about Woolf's life!
I must confess I haven't yet finished 'On Being Ill' but so far I'm finding it incredibly resonate and moving. I'm now dying to re-read some of Woolf's work looking for clues of her chronic illness that she so beautifully, and explicitly, writes about in this short essay. I'm also slightly haunted by the continual image of water, which Amanda highlights above, as we all know that Woolf drowned herself. If you're not sure the essay is for you - let me share (again) the passage that I shall be pinning above my desk:
"English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare of Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and langauge at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. " p.g 6
To join in:
DIRECTIONS TO PARTICIPATE:
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2. Enter Password: mmbookclub
3. Join in our incredible, life changing discussion!
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