Darcey Steinke, acclaimed author of Flash Count Diary and Suicide Blonde, explores the world of pain for those who suffer and those who love them.
Steinke gets to the heart of pain with her usual brilliance, humor, candor, and empathy. In chapters that trace the body—The Spine, The Heart, The Knees, and more—she introduces sufferers to new and ancient understandings of pain through history, philosophy, religion, pop culture, and reported human experience. Leaving no stone unturned, Steinke takes readers under the knife, through the archives, and across oceans. She interviews working physicians, analyzes the writings of Frida Kahlo, recounts her own back surgery, and journeys to Lourdes, where she finds herself invited to participate in the famed pilgrimage site's rituals.
For readers of Joan Didion, C. S. Lewis, Sheila Heti, and Leslie Jamison, This Is the Door beautifully illuminates the experience of pain and its myriad effects on the body, mind, and soul. Whether you are hurting or know someone who is, whether your pain is somatic or spiritual, This Is the Door is a revelation.
"It’s a blessing to live while Darcey Steinke is writing, as This Is the Door makes abundantly clear. Our era may be replete with testimony—and scientific inquiry—into the nature of pain, but no book has yet appeared on the subject with the same spiritual curiosity, lightly-worn erudition, and tender fellow-feeling as Darcey Steinke’s This Is the Door. Kurt Cobain, Audre Lorde, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, the author’s father—all are here, along with many more, in a tapestry that makes the reader feel less alone in embodied life, here rendered as both excruciating and holy" - Maggie Nelson, bestselling author of Bluets and The Argonauts
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“This Is the Door is a work of piercing grace, philosophical wisdom, and rare emotional power. By tracing the history of her own body and spirit, as well as studying the suffering of others, Steinke shows us how physical pain and spiritual faith inform and influence each other. This is a work of art that could only have emerged from the crucible of truth. It’s absolutely beautiful.” - Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and All the Way to the River
"How to articulate the experience of reading a book that so completely altered—even saved—my relationship to my body and to a lifetime of severe pain? Through a gripping combination of memoir, history, and reportage, Darcey Steinke leads the reader through the door of human understanding about suffering and pain to find healing and transcendence. Steinke’s revelatory, lucid prose illuminates the paths others have found through life’s darkest landscapes—grief and heartbreak, pain and suffering, dying and death—leading the reader to find their own way to the other side." - Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis
"Full of wisdom both ancient and cutting-edge, Darcey Steinke's glorious This Is the Door is part lyrical memoir, part fascinating research project, and wholly comforting for anyone grappling with questions of what it means to suffer and to love." - Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can't Sleep and Also a Poet
"Nobody but Darcey Steinke could have written This Is The Door—a profoundly passionate love letter to the body in pain, moving from the clinical to the ecstatic. She meditates on how we get transformed—or even enraptured—by suffering, on the medical, spiritual, and artistic levels. But she faces it with all her raw candor and graceful wit, searching for ways pain can become a kind of revelation." - Rob Sheffield, New York Times bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape
"[Steinke] writes beautifully... an empathetic, communal look at pain from an author who has had her fair share... This is the Door is indeed a book about the body, but it’s also concerned with the soul. Mixed into the chapters on suffering and illness are thoughts on faith and creativity, and they work as a salve." - Epiphany Magazine