In its intellectual generosity, its frankness, and its dexterous deployment of the resources of scholarship toward the ends of life writing, A Body, Undone recalls other invaluable memoirs of illness and disability by feminist academics like Susan Gubars Memoir of a Debulked Woman and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks A Dialogue on Love, though unlike those antecedents Crosby engages explicitly with the now-robust field of disability studies., Crosby weaves poetry and literary references into her her story in an attempt to find meaning in her life. A memoir that is a meditation on disability, metaphor, gender, sex, and love, A Body, Undone is a compelling account of living on, as Crosby rebuilds her body and fashions a life through writing, memory, and desire. Deeply unsentimental, Crosby communicates in unflinching prose the experience of 'diving into the wreck' of her body to acknowledge grief, and loss, but also to recognize the beauty, fragility, and dependencies of all human bodies. Working with these resources, she recalls her 1950s tomboy ways in small-town, rural Pennsylvania, and records growing into the 1970s through radical feminism and the affirmations of gay liberation. To address this foreign body, she calls upon the readerly pleasures of narrative, critical feminist and queer thinking, and the concentrated language of lyric poetry. She writes about a body shot through with neurological pain, disoriented in time and space, incapacitated by paralysis and deadened sensation. In A Body, Undone, Crosby puts into words a broken body that seems beyond the reach of language and understanding. Her chin took the full force of the blow, and her head snapped back. As she crested a hill, she caught a branch in the spokes of her bicycle, which instantly pitched her to the pavement.

She was a respected senior professor of English who had celebrated her fiftieth birthday a month before. A compelling account of recreating a life through writing, memory, and desire In the early evening on October 1, 2003, Christina Crosby was three miles into a seventeen mile bicycle ride, intent on reaching her goal of 1,000 miles for the riding season.

A Body, Undone by Christina Crosby