Riding the Gold Curve

Morgan died shortly after revising her semi-autobiographical first novel of one woman's painful struggle with multiple sclerosis. Abby Palmer, a public health nurse and divorced mother of two young children, is diagnosed at the outset, and the story proceeds to recount her subsequent pains, horrors and small triumphs. Along the way Morgan handles misconceptions about the disease, especially contrasting it to muscular dystrophy, often confused with MS in the public mind. She introduces each of the novel's eight sections with epigraphs drawn from The Merck Manual in order to familiarize the reader with the symptoms and stages of progression and remission. Because of the subject matter, the story sometimes reads like an old-fashioned tearjerker in which good and evil are clearly defined and personified (the latter most notably by an unscrupulous nursing home owner and by Abby's older brother Lucas, a self-righteous deacon). But they are only temporary setbacks: there is never any doubt that MS is the constant antagonist against which the author successfully explores her theme of courage and independence in the face of unavoidable defeat. (Feb.)