Sick Girl
author: Amy Silverstein
name: Paul
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2007
rating: 2
read at: 2011/11/14
date added: 2011/11/14
shelves: non-fiction, memoir
review:
Sick Girl is a very frustrating book to read. Amy Silverstein should be applauded for being frank and brutally honest about her feelings regarding her nearly twenty year fight to stay alive with a transplanted heart given to her when she was only twenty-five. But the takeaway from most of that forthrightness is that she’s kind of a whiny pain in the neck.
The usual recipe I’ve seen in memoirs is that they start out at some random pivotal moment, suck you in, then back way up to the beginning and slowly explain why you should admire/appreciate/identify with the author. Sick Girl works in reverse in that the opening chapter kind of caught my attention as Silverstein contemplates suicide and I found myself thinking, in that context-deprived way, “Yeah, I can see how she’d get there.” Then the author spent the rest of the book convincing me that she was an unappreciative, immature, sad sack of a bore who I found very few redeeming characteristics emanating from.
Let me frame it this way: This is a rich girl with a loving father and stepmom, a practically saintly husband, a wonderful adopted son, apparently many close friends—including some very sympathetic and caring ones, who lived far past her expected ten year projection post-transplant, was able to graduate law school, work a job, exercise regularly, and basically live her whole life in spite of a congenital heart defect that could have killed her long before she found out she had heart issues and needed the life-saving operation. For heaven’s sake she ran with the bulls of Pamplona—a feat many people leave unchecked on their bucket lists—and somehow through all of this she manages to find nothing to fill three hundred pages other than the occasional nod to these abundant blessings and a whole lot of grousing about how terrible it is to be a heart transplant recipient.
I could almost understand if her pre-transplant illness had been protracted, but her hospitalization seems to have been under a year in total. I might be able to see the blackness she describes if her principal complaints—chronic infections from a suppressed immune system, regular (if temporary) misery from the immunosuppression drugs she has to take, lots of crummy doctors and a nebulous loneliness—weren’t, as near as I can tell, either just parts of the human condition or small prices to pay for, you know, life. But try as I may, I was never able to see just what Ms. Silverstein had so very rough.
And maybe that was where I thought the book was the most frustrating, because I really wanted to see the “other side” of the story. The world is awash in heartstring-tugging tales of inspirational courage from cases like hers that defied the odds, with the patients just steadfastly refusing to give in to despair or depression and choosing instead a sunny outlook or a faith they hold dear to carry them through. But Sick Girl fails on a fundamental level to express just how someone with the gifts the author has could possibly continue to choose to be thankless and pessimistic. There are so many points at which her effort to be understood falls flat as her whining and inability to see anything positive makes one wonder if she is in any way deserving of the fortune she so carelessly squanders on self-pity and blame-casting. And tactless tricks like focusing endless, numbing pages on rehashing in so many ways the turmoil she feels about casting a veil over her illness and how miserable it makes her to put on a brave face while skimping on life highlights such as the adoption of her son do little to camouflage her tale, either.
It feels icky to judge a person this way, but in writing this book Silverstein invites it and while I admire her courage in at least trying to explain why she feels the way she does, I closed the book wishing she’d invested half the time she did trying to convince herself she was justified in her sour attitude and outlook trying to find a new way of looking at things instead. Especially when, laid out as it is, it seems so painfully obvious to even the most outside observer.