A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing
By Reynolds Price
Scribner
224pp $13

When it comes to pain, I'm a total lightweight. The sight of a needle makes me shudder. If I were ever tortured, I know I'd confess in three minutes to everything I had done -- and everything I hadn't, too.

Even reading about pain makes me wince and shift uncomfortably in my chair. So it wasn't always easy to immerse myself in a new paperback edition of A Whole New Life, the writer Reynolds Price's classic memoir of his years in cancer hell -- and of his struggle to fight the torment that wracked his body for years. But I'm glad I persevered because, after turning the last page, I felt a glimmer of hope that any pain -- even the most horrific -- can be contained and circumscribed, if not eliminated altogether.

Born in North Carolina in 1933, Price is a prolific Southern novelist, poet, and playwright. In 1984, he was diagnosed with cancer of the spine, an illness that even his doctors predicted would kill him within a short time. It didn't, but after the surgeries and radiation needed to save his life, he found himself so severely disabled he could no longer walk. But what truly felled him was that pain became his most constant companion.

By its very nature, pain is a subjective experience. That's one of the reasons it can be so hard to treat. It's also why describing it in a way that others can grasp is an exceedingly difficult task for a writer. But Price is such an accomplished stylist and keen observer that he is able to transform the physical sensations of his body into something palpable and real and even -- strange to say -- lyrical.

Price first became aware of the agony that would shadow his existence while recovering from his initial round of surgery: "Though [the pain] would grow and diversify with time, it declared its nature and shape that evening," he writes. "I can still call back that first awareness, the clear sense of a white-hot branding iron in the shape of the capital letter 'I' held against my upper spine from the hairline downward some 10 or 12 inches and unrelenting."

Throughout his ordeal, Price continued to write his poems and novels. He struggled -- with intermittent success -- to adapt his life to his altered circumstances. He found solace in his religious faith and in communion with friends. Finally, he consulted doctors and equipped his home with aids for the disabled, and then returned, with trepidation, to his teaching post at Duke University.

But in telling his story, Price frequently revisits the subject of pain, with impressive acuity. "The back pain only ground in deeper," he writes at one point. "There were times each day, for hours at a stretch, when my whole body felt caught in the threads of a giant hot screw and bolted inward to the point of screaming. At such times I'd lie on the bed, chew the corner of a dry pillowcase in dumb confusion, pray for relief or perfect my knowledge of every nick and crack in the ceiling."

For years, doctors treated his pain with morphine, methadone, and other drugs -- to little avail. And it was not until Price finally stumbled upon biofeedback and hypnosis that he regained some semblance of victory over his agony.

"I felt an immediate and almost scary kind of physical relief, as if I'd snorted a sizable line of some illegal drug more potent than any I'd known till now," he writes of his first hypnosis session. "I wasn't addled or dizzy in the least; but I instantly knew I was free in a way I'd never felt before in my life, surely not for a moment of the past three years. The pain was still unquestionably in me; but ... it seemed contained and watched from a distance by my new self-possessed mind and eased body."

This relief stemmed not from altering the pain, but his perception of it. Biofeedback and self-hypnosis, he explains, didn't exactly quell his pain; they simply offered him a method of refocusing his attention, of removing his awareness of his body's troubling sensations to the far edge of consciousness.

Under normal conditions, he notes, pain is a signal to the mind that something is gravely wrong with the body -- something that must be addressed immediately. But in Price's case, as with other kinds of chronic discomfort, the pain was the body's response to past insults that could never be fixed.

"The causes are past, yet the panicked alarm continues to blare," he writes. "The mind's only hope for sanity then is to shut down the useless but frantic circuits and look elsewhere for ease and continuance. In the summer of '87, my mind was finally ready for that action ... Now my mind understood that the harm is done. It cannot be repaired; pain signifies nothing."

This advice on coping with chronic pain is part of Price's essential message -- of acceptance of what's happened, of moving forward rather than looking back. Those who have suffered such enormous physical trauma, he advises, have to mourn the loss of their old selves and set out to discover, as soon as possible, the people they can now become. This, he says, is not just the ultimate key to survival, but to a "whole new life."

"Stanch the grief, by whatever legal means," he writes. "Next find your way to be somebody else, the next viable you -- a stripped-down whole other clear-eyed person, realistic as a sawed-off handgun and thankful for air."

In lesser hands, this sort of advice -- "Pull yourself together! Snap out of it! There's something else ahead!" -- could sound trite or banal or just plain cruel. But it's a testament to Price's skill, and his success in painting the contours of his own painful story, so that by the end of A Whole New Life, you appreciate the profundity and wisdom of his words.

-- David Tuller, a former staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Salon.com. He is also the author of "Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay and Lesbian Russia" (Faber &Faber 1996).

First published July 30, 2003
Last updated December 5, 2007
Copyright © 2003 Consumer Health Interactive