The Body Broken: A Memoir

Twenty-two years after recovering from a devastating car crash when she was 19, Greenberg, a professor at New York City's Hunter College, began experiencing unbearable neck pain. Several hospital visits and X-rays later, it turns out her miraculous recovery after the accident wasn't quite that: one of her vertebrae was still fractured. Greenberg chronicles the two years that follow: the contradicting doctor diagnoses; the descent into drugs and depression; the unraveling of her relationship with her two young children. Harrowing stuff, and when Greenberg keeps her prose spare and direct, as when she describes with cold, gory precision watching her leg being sewn back together, the result is powerful. But Greenberg's account often reads like an extended treatise on pain, overly reliant on metaphor as opposed to anecdote to describe her experience, comparing it, say, to Adam and Eve's fall in Milton's Paradise Lost (Greenberg's field is 17th-century British literature). Otherwise engaging, Greenberg's narrative is a revealing, personal journey through physical trauma.(Mar.)