The Camera My Mother Gave Me takes us through Susanna Kaysen's often comic, sometimes surreal encounters with all kinds of doctors: internists, gynecologists, alternative health experts, as well as with her boyfriend and her friends, when suddenly, inexplicably, something went wrong with her vagina.
The title comes from Luis Bunuel's film Viridiana. Some peasants are at a banquet in a country mansion. They ask a maid to take a group snapshot, and she obliges, lifting up her skirt and using the camera that's underneath.
Kaysen's The Camera My Mother Gave Me observes what happens when sexual pleasure is replaced by pain. When eros goes away, she writes, it's as if I'm colorblind. The world is gray. But is this a problem of body, or mind? And can clinicians tease out the difference between the two?
Spare, frank, and altogether original, The Camera My Mother Gave Me challenges us to think in new ways about the centrality and power of sexuality. It is an extraordinary investigation into the role sex plays in perception and our notions of ourselves, and into what happens when the erotic impulse meets the world of medicine.
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"I wasn't sure how I'd like reading a memoir about a vagina, but I could relate. Not to the particular illness/disorder Kaysen describes, but the not-knowing quest that takes you to doctor's office to doctor's office to doctor's office, hearing different theories each time, trying several "remedies" and asking tons of questions. It's written well, and at no point--even on the first page--does she apologize for discussing her vagina so bluntly. The whole memoir is very matter of fact, making it more understandable."
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Alexis (4 out of 5 stars)