Pain Studies

WINNER OF THE WRITERS LEAGUE OF TEXAS NONFICTION DISCOVERY PRIZE,
A MAYOR’S BOOK CLUB SELECTION,
FINALIST FOR THE BIG OTHER NONFICTION BOOK AWARD


Enlightening . . . this work seeks to express the complex experience of chronic pain by connecting philosophy, popular culture, and personal narratives. Olstein’s writing grabs readers’ attention . . . making this extended lyrical essay shine. ―Library Journal

Fascinating. . . . This extended lyric essay succeeds in delivering an intriguing look at a set of questions with wide relevance. ―Publishers Weekly

Olstein succeeds marvelously when directly reflecting on her own pain and her attempts to treat it. An accomplished poet, she often uses language beautifully and inventively. ―The New York Times

Erudite. . . . Olstein’s blending of the personal and the academic is compelling. . . . A quality addition to the literature on pain. ―Kirkus Reviews

[Olstein] drops the heavy mantles of pain writing and dips, like a swimmer, into the ways that pain infiltrates and orients a bodymind, into the ways that it arranges a life. ―LA Review of Books

Pain Studies is an excavation ― no mere poking around! ― of pain and transcends the restraints of either prose or poetic forms…to produce remarkable work. ―The Literary Review

Rich, absorbing, and suggestive. ―Book Riot

Luminous....truly a dazzling addition to the literature on pain. ―Adroit Journal

Deft, ingenious... ―Lone Star Review

Pain Studies is dazzling, puzzling, ornate, arcane, and deeply intelligent as it moves from perception to perception, always seeking some order or understanding. ―LitMed

In the spirit of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Olstein often detours away from her poetry “lane”: exuberantly shifting from Emily Dickinson to Bruce Springsteen; Antiphon to Donald Judd; The Passion of Joan of Arc to House M.D. I gradually began to think of Pain Studies as a kind of travel literature... So Pain Studies, voyaging to the land of pain, allows us tourists to smell the salt spray and see the brilliant stars, from the safe distance of our seats. –Rain Taxi

Woven throughout Olstein’s personal narrative is a broad cultural perspective on pain: chronic as opposed to a crisis, treatable versus inevitable, Western dovetailing Eastern. Neurologists and scientists weigh in just as much as poets and saints. –Sight Lines

Lisa Olstein’s luminous meditation on pain winds around a beautifully curated series of artifacts. Bits of poetry, ancient medicine, brain science, television episodes, excerpts from the trial of Joan of Arc, and works of art support the spiderweb on which her insights hang like condensed mist. A fascinating, totally seductive read! ―Eula Biss

Lisa Olstein’s remarkable Pain Studies is a book built of brain and nerve and blood and heart, about what it means to live with pain. Irreverent and astute, synthesizing the personal and the historical, popular culture and poetry and visual art, Pain Studies will change how you think about living with a body in our beautiful and doomed world. ―Elizabeth McCracken

These spectacular sentences chart a thrilling investigation into pain, language, and Lisa Olstein’s own exile from what Woolf called ‘the army of the upright.’ On a search path through art, science, poetry, and prime-time television, Olstein aims her knife-bright compassion at the very thing we’re all running from. Pain Studies is a masterpiece. ―Leni Zumas

Lisa Olstein offers readers an eclectic and deeply personal set of meditations on pain as experienced and remembered, inflicted and endured, perceived and denied. Through neuroscience, literature, and history, from hit TV shows to classical philosophy, this is a unique and fascinating contribution to the literature of pain in general, and migraine in particular. ―Katherine Foxhall

Like a prismatic series of artist’s sketches, Pain Studies offers a dazzling variety of perspectives—personal, political, phenomenological, lyrical—on the unanswerable question of human suffering. Through virtuosic readings of everything from pre-Socratic philosophy to the trial transcripts of Joan of Arc to the cultural semiotics of House M.D., Lisa Olstein brilliantly extends the literature of pain into our contemporary historical moment. But this searching work also illuminates how pain studies us. Turning the last page on Olstein’s agonistic anatomy, we’ve come to know one of hurt’s intimate acquaintances, unbroken by her suffering, or if broken in parts, then painstakingly remade. ―Srikanth Reddy

In Pain Studies, Lisa Olstein paints a sharp-witted and insightful picture of the rollercoaster ride that is called pain. Her own experiences allow her to approach the topic in a way that provides relevant reading to anyone treating or living with chronic pain. As doctors, we need to find more effective ways to help patients dealing with pain. This book is a step in that direction. ―Jill Heytens, M.D.

In this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition.