The female body has been studied, medicalized, regimented, and categorized by countless scientists and physicians throughout the ages. Glorified, idealized, and romanticized for its capacity to create life, it has also been simultaneously considered defective compared to the ideal male body, to the point that the condition of being female counts as a state of sickness. Nevertheless, female-specific maladies remain insufficiently researched and poorly treated. Joy Sorman’s Life Sciences (translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud) is an allegorical take on connections between womanhood and illness, and on how female identity is a perpetual process of negotiating one’s relationship to the body.

Ninon Moise has grown up listening to stories about her female ancestors. Since the Middle Ages, each generation has included at least one woman who has been uniquely affected by an unusual, undiagnosable, and often untreatable condition. Symptoms range from mild color blindness and inexplicable laughing fits to debilitating chronic pain and complete loss of sight and hearing. When Ninon is seventeen, she is struck by her own version of the curse: Any touch, however slight, to the skin on her arms causes unbearable pain. She visits specialists of all kinds — dermatologists, occupational therapists, psychiatrists, mediums, shamans. Each is more and more improbable, and all fail to properly diagnose, let alone cure, her illness. Her treatment history is a meticulous record of her evolving relationship to her illness, her family history, and her self-conception.

Although Ninon attempts to make sense of her condition, ordinary language is insufficient to convey her experience, and the effort to do so often proves fruitless. Visiting the dermatologist, she describes her pain by saying that “her arms are like a pile of embers consuming themselves without end, that the pain is the edge of a sharp blade, a bite, it’s wasp stings, lashes of a whip, cat scratches on a sunburn.” She then finds herself meditating on how she’s never fully experienced any of the things to which her metaphorical language refers. A different specialist provides Ninon with a detailed questionnaire meant to capture and isolate the exact sensation that troubles her. The options are dizzyingly many and excessively fine-grained: “Does your pain feel like: chills, burns, cuts, rips, stings, twinges, constrictions, spasms, quivers, punches, throbbing, itching, crushing, stretching, twisting, wrenching, tingling, pinching, pins and needles, numbness, tightness, heaviness, electrical shocks, hammer blows, knife stabs? Cross out any that do not apply.” The narrator dryly comments that the questionnaire “strikes Ninon as a joke, one that’s not funny.” This is unsurprising. Pain is an essentially private, first-person experience, but language, as a human artefact, is shareable, that is, public.

However private pain might be, to cope with it one needs a way to bring it out into the open. As disability activists and writers have long emphasized, it is useful to retain categories such as “disabled” and “chronically ill,” not because they are descriptively perspicuous, but because they permit those who identify with the labels to feel part of a community. This is especially important because living with painful conditions is so often lonely and isolating. Indeed, Ninon suffers more from isolation than from pain. She never refers to herself with the public sort of label that we might be tempted to apply to her (“chronically ill,” for instance), and it never occurs to her that the community of people like her, with whom she might seek a connection, includes people outside her own family. She constantly refers to the stories of her childhood, seeking examples, precedents, models; she reaches backwards in time, and inwards into her identity as the youngest member of a cursed family.

Ninon and her family’s story can be read as a commentary on the idea that women are subject to a biological destiny. Ninon’s mother, Esther, herself suffering from a relatively mild condition, is an uncritical exponent of this view. Meticulously, and with quasi-fetishistic enthusiasm, she records all the cases in her family history, and she eagerly waits for Ninon’s version of the curse to manifest itself: “It’s as though that distinctiveness can only be revealed through her genes, as though uniqueness can only be expressed by a cell line.” But ultimately the novel does not endorse Esther’s point of view: as we see Ninon becoming increasingly estranged from her mother, we also come to question and challenge the idea that women’s lives can be determined in this way.

It’s fitting that Ninon’s condition manifests itself in late adolescence, a transitional time when young people learn how to reject old norms and create new ones for themselves. It is an especially important time for girls who are now expected to “become women.” For Ninon in particular, the expectation is that to be a woman is to simply be an unprotesting carrier of the family curse. In the end, whether Ninon is cured or not is irrelevant. What matters narratively is how, in seeking relief, she learns to cast off the idea of biological destiny. Towards the end of the novel, she comes to see that her experience has broadened her possibilities for self-definition. She imagines “brothers for herself in the convicts and criminals tattooing themselves in their jail cells […] in the delinquents who defined the Church’s interdiction […] in the soldiers of France’s North African battalions […] sisters in those first tattooed women.” While she never fully sheds her self-conception as a member of her singular family, she refuses to let that determine her destiny.

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