Writing for Her Life

...The witch becomes a surrogate friend/therapist, a paid receptacle for the secrets Laura prefers not to divulge elsewhere...

...Outrageous Practices: The Alarming Truth About How Medicine Mistreats Women" ACCORDING to medical experts, we are a nation of sleep-deprived zombies, relying on mechanical alarms to wake us up each morning and double espressos to keep us functioning during the day...

...The "illness" was an excuse to avoid sex, childbearing and housekeeping...

...I almost hear the bed whispering to me to come, the way you might feel a lover longing for you miles away, and I come readily, falling onto the waiting mattress, firm but yielding as an accomplished lover, the strong coils beneath the stuffing like reliable bones beneath the flesh...

...After Laura's doctor declares that the symptoms she has stem from a virus, she says: "I felt rather heady, knowing I had something mysterious and tenacious though not fatal...

...Laura wants to rewrite history by creating "the revised vision of Ev's life that keeps him safely in his seaside town so he doesn't end in a pool of blood on a Bronx street but grows old and hoary...

...She seems to want to continue working on her writing project and herrelationships, yet the fatigue gives her an excuse to step back...

...The book she is doing, an homage to her dead husband, is another sort of escape...

...Actually, CFS is merely the backdrop forthebook's narrative, which really deals with a woman's struggle to come to terms with loss, middle age and loneliness...

...Frustrated by the unsympathetic attitude of her traditional physician, she visits a "witch" who burns herbs and inserts needles, but even more therapeutically expresses sympathy for Laura's symptoms and encourages her to talk about what is happening in her life...

...They' might call me a novelist, but I began to write essays that occasionally sounded like fiction, just as my novels occasionally sounded like essays...

...The languid sentences and general lack of action in the novel—most of its events occur in the past—are lulling, and suggest the fatigue the text describes...

...As] the prisoner's digging toward daylight becomes a passage out, writing through the sickness meant it would have an end...

...Some of the consequences of this are explored in Lynne Sharon Schwartz' new novel The Fatigue Artist, whose ostensible subject is exhaustion...

...Laura endures her increasingly debilitating illness while trying to cope with the violent death of her husband, the demands of two lovers, her complicated relationship with her stepchildren, the pressures of social obligations, and the stress of her writing career...

...She is steamed at her new boyfriend for his conventionality...

...Schwartz' reference to the story implies that Laura's fatigue also gives her some pleasure and serves a purpose in her life...

...The themes echo those in the author's earlier work...

...Eventually, writing becomes a way out of Laura's miasma...

...Totally understanding, the bed accepts that I have nothing to offer but warmth, which I have in abundance...

...Laura's efforts to find relief from her fatigue become a type of indulgence, too...

...we feel how tired Laura is...

...The novel Disturbances in the Field has a narrator who leads an idyllic life until she must deal with the accidental death of two of her children, and then with abandonment by both her husband and older offspring...

...The reverse could easily be asked today: Is the illness many attribute to a virus in truth an attempt by women to escape a persisting patriarchal system...

...In the Introduction to her eponymous Reader, Schwartz defends her stylistic choice: "I was labeled a novelist...

...She decides to "write for her life"—to abandon the book she is working on about her dead husband and the idyllic seaside town, and instead begin a more personal account of her own illness: "I would put despair to work, using a pen the way prisoners use a spoon—stolen at great risk from the cafeteria—to dig a tunnel through the dirt barring them from freedom...

...There is no doubt, however, that invalidism or neurasthenia, for instance, resulted in women becoming languid hypochondriacs, spending days in bed with headaches, "nerves" or other vague complaints...

...The greatest escape for Laura, though, is bed...

...The boundaries of the two genres are blurred by biographical overlap between the author, a recent sufferer of CFS, and her protagonist, as well as by an intimate, essayistic fiction style...

...Like that tale of an urban coming of age, it reads as if it were a memoir...

...Most bouts of CFS fade as spontaneously and mysteriously as they appear, but in the interim the afflicted must work at keeping their lives as full and demanding as possible...

...Schwartz' literary style mirrors the protagonist's energy level...

...When I came to the end of the book, the sickness would be over...

...Similarly, the grinding fatigue of CFS sufferers, even if psychogenic in origin, is very real...

...Give it my best shot...

...As her life becomes increasingly dominated by the battle against exhaustion, the bed becomes her ultimate lover, always ready to embrace and console, never demanding...

...The Fatigue Artist is Schwartz' first novel since Leaving Brooklyn appeared six years ago...

...The short story "Acquainted with the Night" and the poem "Urban Insomnia," for example, are about the inability to sleep...

...Every cell yields to the embrace which of late I find satisfying like no other...

...Her illness becomes an escape from her rage and the demands of others upon her...

...As Laura begins to understand the emotional underpinnings of her malady and to feel more in control of her life, her weariness slowly begins to abate...

...that my novels were coming to sound more and more essayistic, with leisurely musing passages about how I saw and felt things...

...After hearing her friend Grace, a performance artist, discuss plans for making upcoming dental work a performance piece, Laura ponders taking advantage of her ailment by converting it into a public spectacle: "Kafka had his hunger artist...

...In the absence of medication to help them function (not that there is a shortageof physicians willingto prescribe drugs, or in some cases surgery) many people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome seek out New Age or Eastern healers for relief...

...Her novel compellingly and entertainingly recounts the story of modern urban life, where exhaustion, violence, stress, and loneliness are commonplace, but not invincible...

...Chronic Fatigue Syndrome may be the diagnosis of the moment, but Schwartz transcends its trendiness to explore more universal themes...

...Although Schwartz' personal experience undoubtedly has left her with strong views about the medical controversy concerning Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, she gracefully skirts them...

...And she is upset with a long-term lover, mysteriously referred to only as "Q," for not leaving his wife to marry her...

...She makes it the subject of a rhapsody: "My bed, a modest double, nothing kingly or queenly, has become more than a haven or refuge...

...She is angry at her spouse—killed by a stray bullet in a Bronx street while doing a newspaper story—for being absent...

...She describes it as a modern-day fable "set in an idyllic town washed by the sea and lulled by the rhythms of the tides, a salty-aired benevolent town where, aside from the explosive vagaries of nature—gales and storms—nothing ever goes much awry, a keen contrast to my city, guarded by rivers and shaken by car alarms and shrieking sirens...

...In "A Hunger Artist," Kafka's title character admits, just before dying of starvation, that his profession—fasting—was not a hardship but a pleasure...

...All those Victorian heroines we thought were stifled by the patriarchal system—was it just a virus...

...He simply did not enjoy food...

...It's a lover...

...I need not respond or embrace in return...

...Her attempts to integrate her illness into her life are sometimes humorous, as when she muses about turning her disability into a professsion...

...As the bed presses gently along the length of me, I let go...

...The Fatigue Artist, however, is not merely the chronicle of an illness...

...The bed seeks nothing for itself—its pleasure is to wrap me in pleasure...

...Or is it all the same sickness translated into different symptoms, behaving metaphorically...

...For women, who must often juggle career and family responsibilities, the weariness is exponentially increased...

...Researchers are still arguing about whether CFS is caused by a thus far unidentified viral infection or is psychosomatic—one of a long line of emotional "diseases," such as hysteria and invalidism in the last half of the 19th century, that tended to afflict affluent women...

...When she refuses Q's request to stay the night, she wonders, "Does this mean I am 'getting over' Q? Does the onset of one sickness obliterate the previous sickness...

...But I noticed...

...Laura's predicament is at bottom an exaggerated version of the contemporary condition described by modern sleep-deprivation researchers...

...I could be the first fatigue artist...

...Neurasthenia, it sounded like...

...Herbs and acupuncture seem as effective—or ineffective—as anything Western medicine has to offer...

...Laura, the protagonist narrator, is a Manhattan woman suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), the catch-all diagnosis for apatch-work quilt of vague symptoms including weakness, tiredness, malaise, and muscle aches...