How Does it Hurt? Narrating Pain

Author(s): Stephanie de Montalk

NZ Biographies

'It was pelvic pain and it started slowly in November 2003, two weeks after a fall. I slipped on the marble bathroom floor of a Warsaw hotel and bounced off the sharp edge of the bath, breaking three ribs on the lower left side. The pain was intermittent at first. It was also familiar...' In How Does It Hurt?, acclaimed poet and biographer Stephanie de Montalk tells the story of the chronic pain that has invaded her life for more than ten years. She considers how her early experiences have been cast into fresh relief by what she has endured, then goes back in time to investigate the lives and works of three writers who also lived with and wrote about pain: 'the consolator', English social theorist Harriet Martineau (1802-1876), 'the vendor of happiness', French novelist Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897), and 'the imago', Polish poet Aleksander Wat (1900-1967). Through these explorations De Montalk confronts the paradox of writing about suffering: where we can turn when the pain is beyond words? A unique blend of memoir, imaginative biography and poetry, How Does It Hurt? is a groundbreaking contribution to the understanding of chronic pain, and a spellbinding literary achievement.


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9780864739698
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : Victoria University of Wellington Press
  • : November 2014
  • : New Zealand
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Stephanie de Montalk
  • : hardback with dustjacket
  • : 1st Edition
  • : 381