In our culture, telling the world that you, a woman, suffer from migraine or other mysterious and difficult-to-treat disorders is still tantamount to telling the world you are mad: unstable, unreliable, moaning, self-obsessed. So it's a brave creature who announces such a thing, let alone writes a book about it. The novelist Siri Hustvedt, who has done just that, dislikes these preconceptions as much as the next sufferer, but accepts that they exist; she has seen enough weary and disbelieving doctors. Her best defence in the face of their sighs? She will treat the subject as coolly and as intellectually as possible.
Not for her the foetid claustrophobia of the misery memoir. The Shaking Woman is the product of voracious reading and deep thought, and you register its author's sanity in every sentence. If she has not been able to provide as many answers as she might have liked, it is not for want of trying, for she asks all the right questions.
When her father died at the age of 82, Hustvedt was sad, but she was able to deliver the eulogy at his funeral in a "strong voice, without tears". Two years later, however, she was giving a talk in his honour when she began to shudder violently from the neck down. "My arms flapped. My knees knocked. I shook as if I was having a seizure." Amazed, she continued to talk; her voice wasn't affected. But only when she had finished speaking did her body cease its violent movements. Hustvedt looked down. Her legs were deep red, with a bluish cast. "It appeared that some unknown force had suddenly taken over my body and decided I needed a good sustained jolt." Her mother said she felt as if she had been looking at an electrocution.
But these extraordinary vibrations had not, in truth, come from nowhere. Years before, in a Paris gallery, Hustvedt had found her arm jerking upwards, and her body slamming into a wall: a convulsion that led to a year-long migraine for which she was eventually hospitalised and given anti-psychotic drugs ("vascular migraine syndrome," said the medical profession, in the same tone as, once, doctors might have asked nurse to pass the smelling salts). Ever since, she has suffered from migraine and its associated symptoms: visual disturbances, sparkly highs, jet-black wearinesses. She is sensitive to certain kinds of light and noise. More unusually, she has mirror-touch synesthesia: a form of extreme empathy that means she experiences other people's pain and sorrow almost as if they were her own. Still, the shaking is a new thing, and it soon occurs again.
What follows is a medical mystery. Is her shaking in fact a panic attack? Or is it epilepsy? For a while, she is convinced she has conversion disorder, which is what hysteria is called nowadays. She visits a psychoanalyst, and a neurologist; she has an MRI scan. These experts cannot help her much – her brain looks just dandy, says her doctor – but along the way she thinks, long and hard, about illness: where it begins, and where it ends; its impact on personality, and personality's impact on it.
Her references are wide: Freud, Charcot, Sacks and Pinker are all here. In tackling their work, Hustvedt combines the neediness of the patient – please, let me be cured! – with the scepticism of a judge. She is, by trade, a storyteller but she knows that narratives, of the kind that Freud so seductively conjured, can mislead. She is open to science but experience tells her some things cannot, yet, be explained by reference only to neurotransmitters and hemispheres.
Is she cured of her shake in the end? Yes, and no. Beta-blockers do prevent it revealing itself outwardly but deep inside she feels its vibrations still. So what next? Well, Hustvedt, china complexion or not, is tough. What lies ahead is ownership of her shake, its annexation, and – less pleasing to me – a certain positivity. "Health is tolerant of ill health," wrote Winnicott. Hustvedt has always taken this to mean that health can tolerate some disintegration. She can function. She will make the best of it. She is the shaking woman.
