The Shaking Woman  Reviewed By  Siri Hustvedt’s memoir is a
sprawling exploration of memory and the ways trauma manifests in
physical illness—less Mary Karr, more Oliver Sacks.  Following
her father’s death, novelist Siri Hustvedt split into two women:
one who fell into sharp, inexplicable body tremors at unexpected
moments, and another woman, even more tortured, who became
fixated on the existence of the first. It’s that second woman,
the tortured one, who narrates Hustvedt’s fascinating memoir The
Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, a clinical yet visceral
look into not just how our body responds to loss, but the more
complicated ways in which our minds cope with the uncertainty of
undiagnosable illness.  The setup is this: During a speech
honoring the memory of her father two years after his funeral,
Hustvedt’s body convulsed with a force so raw and enveloping
that her relatives in the audience—who rushed the podium to hold
her still—felt as though “they were looking at an
electrocution.” Yet when it