The Camera My Mother Gave Me
By Susanna Kaysen. Alfred A. Knopf, 159 pages, $21.

Despite all the hoopla about the subject of Susanna Kaysen’s new memoir, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, this is basically a straightforward mystery. Yes, it deals with a sore spot (sometimes several sore spots) in the author’s vagina. But despite this book’s being dismissed rather peevishly as " autopathography " by the New York Times, it is not self-indulgent. Neither is it an exercise in the kind of intense self-examination that might otherwise be referred to as navel gazing. Which may prove to be its fatal flaw.

Instead, what Kaysen — a talented novelist still best known as the author of the memoir Girl, Interrupted — gives us is an old-fashioned puzzle. What is her mysterious ailment? How is it affected by her emotions, particularly her disintegrating relationship with her nameless boyfriend (he comes across as a particularly unsympathetic shmuck who pressures her for sex despite the pain it causes her)? How does sexuality — or the lack of it, when no treatment seems to work — shape, or disfigure, the self-image of a fortysomething woman? How do we live with chronic pain?

These are large questions that are at times deftly implied in Kaysen’s clear and often understated narrative. Considering the possible end of her sex life, she confides in a friend: " Oh Paula, I said. I put my head down on the table. Is it really all over? Would it be just as all over if my vagina still worked? " Mulling over her constant pain, she notes how it has changed her: " Low-grade pain is debilitating in a subtle way, " she writes, with a confidence that anyone who has experienced a back injury or even a nagging toothache can recognize. " The fact of the pain was the burden. This fact was like an unwieldy piece of luggage that I had to drag around. " Such simple, descriptive sentences speak directly to the reader, making difficult subjects eminently readable.

The bulk of the book, however, concerns the more prosaic aspects of her hunt for a cure, as she goes from her trusted gynecologist to an internist, a holistic " alternative nurse, " a surgeon, and back again, consulting medical journals and well-educated friends along the way. But this extreme subtlety, this almost prosaic approach to life’s larger issues, hurts the book. The play-by-play keeps the medical mystery rolling along, but because the bigger questions are not made explicit until close to the end of this very short work, they seem like afterthoughts, as if the author were too drained by her pain to tackle them, or too afraid.

The medical mystery, for example, does not have a solution. Which may be the point, and a half-page epilogue concludes that the implied mind-body interaction may have more weight than Kaysen has been willing to credit earlier. But then the subject, like the book, ends. Perhaps another 20 pages would have revealed more of the author’s mind. For now, she seems content to raise the questions and leave them at that.

More troubling are blind spots in the narrative that make the book (and its creator) much less sympathetic. The only treatment that works, for example, is a low dosage of an antidepressant. Kaysen provides an amusing one-page answer to the question of why she doesn’t like these psychoactive drugs: " Because often depression is an appropriate reaction. Because I am terrified of changing the functioning of my brain in any way. . . . These are the typical idiotic reasons people give for not wanting to feel better. So in this respect, I am quite normal. " But her complete rejection of the one treatment that ends what has been described as debilitating pain seems out of place. Isn’t she willing to give the drugs more than one day, in the hope that the side effect of disorientation might wear off? Is she not willing to try a lower dosage? Apparently not, and another option is dismissed.

Equally confusing is her reaction to rejection when a younger man she has befriended turns down her sexual overtures. She has never, we are told, so misread a man’s signals before. She acknowledges that her affections have been misled in the past, but never her genitals. " My vagina did a somersault. . . . Now I knew that our bodies talked to each other, " she writes. Previously, she explains, the way her body has transmitted this knowledge is with its own arousal. The reciprocity, she assumes, is always there. " My vagina had not made this sort of mistake before. " Are we to assume, then, that Kaysen has never before wanted a man who did not want her? She uses the rejection to explore the role of sexuality in an aging woman’s life. Her certainty, her trust in her vagina’s " judgment, " however, hints at a much more basic passage: the experience of unrequited lust. Either Kaysen’s terse prose has left something out or aging is going to be much harder for the author than she yet realizes.

Susanna Kaysen will read from The Camera My Mother Gave Me at WordsWorth, 30 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, tonight, Thursday October 18, at 7 p.m. Call (617) 354-5201.

Issue Date: October 18 - 25, 2001