I play tennis, but I’m no\u00a0Rafa Nadal! I cook spaghetti, but I’m no Gordon Ramsay! And while I write about pain, I’m no\u00a0Andrew Levy,\u00a0author of A Brain Wider than the Sky<\/em>,\u00a0a memoir of his 20+ years of experiences with migraines.<\/p>\n It is a\u00a0spellbinding, creative work. His power as a writer lets\u00a0even those of us without migraines into\u00a0the private experience of severe headaches.<\/p>\n September: there is no line between the migraine and worrying about the migraine as one lies awake at five in the morning. There is no difference between the first pinpricks of aura and the\u00a0first gray rays of dawn, either, since one looks like the other, and since the latter seems to cause the former.<\/p>\n The pain will come if it wants to come.\u00a0I can feel the shuffling under my brow, the blood and the nerves meditating, a little rush, a little constriction. It almost feels as if they’re considering\u00a0whether to make a commitment.<\/p>\n It starts from a point somewhere and pulsates, enlarges. By the third or fourth throb, a new pain appears, something after the throbs, like the afterimage on a television, a glow that grows fainter, until the next pulsation renews it. There’s a density now, a consistency. I get up, and while the rest of my body feels normal, my head feels as if it is shedding pieces as it rises, like the trail of a comet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Levy also relates the impact\u00a0to himself and his family of his\u00a0chronic disability. His\u00a0preschool son often scoped out the scene each morning to see if the “interloper” was present.\u00a0“Aedan has understood that he had to negotiate with the headache, as if it were a third party.”<\/p>\n Levy explores\u00a0the\u00a0writings of other migraineurs – Freud, Virginia Woolf, Nietzsche –\u00a0and analyzes\u00a0the relation between migraine and creativity. He relates his own dance with treatment, and avoiding it. He also\u00a0summarizes\u00a0newer theories about the causes of migraine, and what’s on the horizon for remedies.<\/p>\n My favorite parts of the book were Levy’s descriptions of his own experiences – breathtakingly\u00a0vivid and fresh:<\/p>\n The beep of the microwave oven as it is tapped, 3, 2, 1, start, producing a corresponding stab above the left eye, a gentle one, tap, tap, tap, tap, each a fraction of a second after the corresponding microwave beep, the way that thunder just follows a near lightning strike.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Some descriptions were funny, “And headaches: I gathered a collection of small ones, the way other people keep figurines.”<\/p>\n A Brain Wider than the Sky <\/em>is a must-read for anyone with migraines\u00a0or any pain\u00a0condition. But I think any reader who likes inspired writing will love this book. Levy’s\u00a0auras are at times, “a transporting sensation of awe, of joy, of clarity.” These\u00a0also well describe his book!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I play tennis, but I’m no\u00a0Rafa Nadal! I cook spaghetti, but I’m no Gordon Ramsay! And while I write about pain, I’m no\u00a0Andrew Levy,\u00a0author of A Brain Wider than the Sky,\u00a0a memoir of his 20+ years of experiences with migraines. It is a\u00a0spellbinding, creative work. His power as a writer lets\u00a0even those of us without […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2042"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7920,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2042\/revisions\/7920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.howtocopewithpain.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}