You Will Never Be Normal by Catherine Klatzker

An instruction manual on falling apart to come together again, Catherine Klatzker’s frank memoir, You Will Never Be Normal, confronts the darkness with the enlightenment of telling. Klatzker, a retired pediatric ICU nurse of 22 years, weaves together a lifetime of repressed trauma and abuse with the laser-sharp humanity of an attentive RN.  The story—and the author’s often wrenching rendering of it in flashback vignettes—is not the typical clinician-as-patient narrative but one that engages the reader to join her as she makes her way towards healing. 

The embodied experience of an adult survivor of sexual and emotional abuse is one of shame, panic and confusion, and Klatzker tells it all with grace, sparing little in her exploration of the physiological manifestations of her own trauma such as insomnia and incontinence. We feel her suffering but also her professional detachment: It’s as if she’s conducting a thorough patient history of her own past. 

Catherine Klatzker is a memoirist, poet, wife, mother, grandmother, friend, meditator, a retired pediatric ICU RN of 22 years, and a member of the Authors Guild. Her work has appeared in Atticus Review, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Emrys Journal, Lime Hawk Journal, The Examined Life Journal, Tiferet Journal and in mental health anthologies. Originally from the quad cities of Illinois, she now lives in southern California with her husband, delightedly nearby their children and grandchildren. Photo by Baz Here

Readers become familiar with the embodiment of her triggers as she welcomes us into the wounds of her intimate relationships. Klatzker’s family becomes our family, her partners our partners—and her demons become ours. “No one knew the extra layer of experience I brought to my own pain, to my own body, filtering my experience of myself,” she tells us. To cope, Klatzker mastered the art of dissociating into “parts,” or what she describes as “going away,” sometimes happening while she was at work in the hospital or at home caring for her child.

Learning about the causes and triggers of Klatzker’s Parts (or what is later labeled Traumatic Dissociative Identity Disorder) is a heartbreaking revelation throughout the memoir. “What I knew was gut-knowledge, stored in my body,” Klatzker states, and that knowledge unfolds in devastating and plain language, a subconscious realization oftentimes unfolding mid-sentence. Her Parts often take hostage of her mind at random moments, coming into play when she’s driving or during emotional interludes with her husband. Fragmented memories emerge in  the many versions of herself she meets and refines over the years. 

In unpacking precarious relationships, deaths, and more, Klatzker’s relationship with her psychotherapist is one that models seeing her as a whole person and not just the sum of her parts. “He spoke in language all my parts would understand, trying to get the same message across to all of us, so there would be no gaps.” The deep work they do together inspires readers to reflect on the way healing from trauma is rarely linear and never truly ends. Yet there is a sense of resolution to Klatzker’s bleak house of pain: In telling her story, she confronts her past and envisions the way to move forward. In the end, the book’s title takes on new meaning: You Will Never Be Normal is not a life sentence but instead an acknowledgement of difference and an acceptance of it.— Angelica Recierdo

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Angelica Recierdo works as a Clinical Content Editor at Doximity in San Francisco, CA. She received her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Northeastern University and her M.S. in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. Angelica was also a Global Health Corps Fellow in 2016-17. She has worked at the intersection of health and writing/communications, specifically in the fields of healthcare innovation, health equity, and racial justice. Angelica is a creative writer, and her work can be found in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Literary Orphans, HalfwayDownTheStairs and The Huntington News, among others. Her essay “Coming Out of the Medical Closet” appeared in the Spring 2014 Intima.

Barriers and Belongings: Personal Narratives of Disabilities, Edited by Michelle Jarman, Leila Monaghan, and Alison Quaggin Harkin

An Iraq veteran fighting the “quiet conflict” of PTSD, a woman with memory loss who hides her disability as well as her misery, a man whose traumatic brain injury helps him make sense ofhis brother’s disability.  These are a few of the many voices we learn from in Barriers and Belongings.

At first glance, the book is a disabilities studies textbook with an introduction and chapter openings that provide background on social and cultural approaches to disability, as well as useful definitions.  But Barriers and Belongings is much more than a textbook:  it’s an eye-opening collection of lives, told with honesty and moving candor.  The narratives, which are organized into sections around themes such as communication, family and relationships, are engaging and short, allowing room for many different points of view.  Most are written from the perspective of early adulthood, reflecting back on growing up, which gives them an appealing coming-of-age quality.  The writers lead us up to the moment their conception of their disability changes in some way.  The ways are as varied as the disabilities themselves, which range from acquired conditions such as PTSD and chronic pain, to congenital conditions such as cerebral palsy and Down Syndrome, to mental health and cognitive conditions.  Because of these many viewpoints, one writer identifies the need for “people with diverse disabilities [to] recognize our common struggle” in order for the disability movement to reach its “full potential to change society.”

For the book is as much about the larger society as it is about the individual stories.  Most of the writers see disability not as a problem to be solved but as an integral part of themselves, and want to reframe disability from a nonsocial and nonmedical perspective.  As one writer puts it, “I wonder how the world would be if everyone realized that normal didn’t exist, and that trying to achieve normalcy was futile.  What if disability didn’t always need a cure?  What if everyone equated disability with difference, not deficiency?”  Or as another writes:  “Sometimes, abnormal is normal.”

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PRISCILLA MAINARDI, a registered nurse, attended the University of Pennsylvania and earned her MFA degree in creative writing from Rutgers University.  Her work appears in numerous journals, most recently The Examined Life Journal and Prick of the Spindle.  She teaches English Composition at Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey.  Her short story “Pretending Not to Know” appeared in the Spring 2014 Intima.

Scars: An Anthology. Edited by Erin Wood

For more on this book, go to www.etaliapress.com

For some two years, Erin Wood spent her time examining scars. As careful and probing as a surgeon, the writer and editor of Scars: An Anthology examined a wealth of poems, photographs, and prose about the subject and handled each person's revealing narrative with the emerging understanding that "there is a great deal about our scars that extends far beyond the individual body and the self."

Wood, whose essay "We Scar, We Heal, We Rise" was a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2013 (it appears in this volume) reflects on the ways scars may "belong to different versions of ourselves: our past selves...or new selves, selves in transition, or even selves we wish to regard more fully."

Stories that address these issues make the collection a rich reading experience that at times can be intense and painful, but also enlightening and entertaining. There is a lot of humor alongside the humanity that's revealed, as well as insight into the clinical encounter, most notably in Sayantani DasGupta's "'Tell Me About Your Scar': Narrative Medicine and The Scars of Intelligibility." One of the most moving and insightful pieces in the collection is "The Women's Table," an interview with Andrea Zekis, who speaks frankly about her "gender confirmation surgery" and the scars, emotional and physical, created but also taken away during her transition. A photo essay by New York photographer David Jay, who began The SCAR Project, is a stunning look at those who show their scars frankly and with pride. And while many of the pieces in this book are personal essays and memoirs, it is the poetry— like Samantha Plakun's "Written In Stitches" and Philip Martin's "The Pry Bar"—that draws the reader in close to examine the beauty and personal history revealed in the body's terrain.—Donna Bulseco

On December 10,2015, Columbia University's Seminar on Narrative, Health and Social Justice presented "Scars as Art, Text and Experience" at the Faculty House, featuring Editor Erin Wood and contributors Kelli Dunham, Lorrie Fredette, Samantha Plakun, and Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes. Marsha Hurst, who is a lecturer in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and co-chairs the University Seminar on "Narrative, Health, and Social Justice" introduced the panel. Hurst is co-editor with Sayantani DasGupta of Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies. Listen to the event in its entirety below: