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The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir
A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human
Description
In this lyrical, radically expansive self-portrait, celebrated poet, author, and lecturer Sophie Strand explores—with searing insight and honesty—the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves.
At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore?
In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers readers a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness—a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networks she begins to see as a metaphor for the profound connections between all species and the earth. Grounded deeply in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, each moment of this far-reaching narrative snakes its way through the multi-layered ecology of the land around us, from the stunningly powerful pollen of a phlox plant to the unexpected beauty and wisdom of the woodchuck.
The Body Is a Doorway dives into the murky waters of sickness and trauma, as well as the resonant challenges and joys of friendship, young adulthood, first love, and fertility. Throughout, in precise, sparkling language, it explores questions both personal and universal: Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending? Is there something wilder and more symbiotic beyond narrow ideas of well-being?
At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore?
In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers readers a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness—a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networks she begins to see as a metaphor for the profound connections between all species and the earth. Grounded deeply in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, each moment of this far-reaching narrative snakes its way through the multi-layered ecology of the land around us, from the stunningly powerful pollen of a phlox plant to the unexpected beauty and wisdom of the woodchuck.
The Body Is a Doorway dives into the murky waters of sickness and trauma, as well as the resonant challenges and joys of friendship, young adulthood, first love, and fertility. Throughout, in precise, sparkling language, it explores questions both personal and universal: Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending? Is there something wilder and more symbiotic beyond narrow ideas of well-being?
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Praise
“This memoir, like all of Sophie’s work, defies capture. Reading her is like stepping out of time and into something visceral and haunting and reclaiming. Her prose is a balm that calls me back to myself time and time again into a deeper type of knowing and remembering; this is the kind of book that will make you talk to trees and pray to moths, which to me is an urgent and necessary act.”
—Holly Whitaker, Author of Quite Like a Woman
"Full of arresting, luminous, and generative insight. Like a forest spirit gifted with a lyrical pen, Strand shows us the extraordinary connections among bodies, energies, metaphors, and ecologies. Her work brims with wisdom about health and illness, meaning and mystery. A must-read."
—David George Haskell, Biologist and author of Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen
"Sophie Strand is a poetic thinker, dreamer, and visionary whose words bridge the false divides between the ecological, the political, and the spiritual to present us with a re-membering of the collective body that connects all life. In The Body Is A Doorway, Strand inhabits the lyric memoir with seemingly effortless grace, weaving seamlessly from the story of her personal journey through illness, love, and life amidst social and environmental collapse a meditative reflections on humanity's relationship with itself and the rest of the world. Bound together by Strand's delicate prose and shimmering intellect, these threads come together to form a tapestry that offers the reader a map for navigating our world's increasingly uncertain future. Throughout the book, Strand fearlessly plumbs the depth of human society's shadow sides but never gives in to despair, drawing from her characteristic affinity for mythology and archetypal imagination to generate meaning, beauty, and hope. Readers will leave this book with a deeper connection to the numinosity of life, death, and everything in between."
—Kai Cheng Thom, Author of Falling Back In Love With Being Human
“Against the stentorian city sounds screaming the latest new spells to guarantee "healing" and "wellbeing" to the zealous pilgrim, a whispery song wafts gently across the streets, past the doorways and signs marked by unpronounceable therapies, and through the crevices of our exhausted bodies. Sophie Strand's more-than-human song, her brilliance, her earthbound theology of the body in its gloriously awkward dehiscence, traces out a turn in the fabric of things: a moment when we seem to be recognizing that we are of this earth and we must move and crawl and fall and die and live again at its own pace. Read this book, written lovingly in the lowercase, and you might find yourself scandalized by the spirit of Sophie's sermon: that your body is and always was a doorway, not the house."
—Bayo Akomolafe, Ph.D., W. E. B. DuBois Scholar-in-Residence, Schumacher Center for a New Economics Author, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home
"The Body is a Doorway touched my heart, nurtured my soul and enchanted my spirit in a way no other book has. Sophie Strand's vulnerable and powerful memoir is a potent reminder that healing is a process of becoming, not an end goal. We are not linear beings; we are ever expansive and interconnected. This rare gem is a must read for anyone on a journey of self-actualization and self-love."
—Bunny Michael, Author of Hello, Higher Self
“The Body is a Doorway is an epic poem of survival -- an act of devotion to life itself. While chronic illness lures some victims to abandon their bodies, for Sophie it has been a tether: a calling more deeply into relationship with her body and the living world. Each new mysterious symptom, every medical gatekeeper, even the pathological judgements of the wellness Industry are turned into compost by this eloquent writer. From it sprouts the healing metaphors of nature’s belonging. This book will feel like a bosom friend to anyone who lives in the lonely land of the sick.”
—Toko-pa Turner, Author of Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home
"When she finds herself grappling with the confounding terrors of chronic illness, one of the most visionary novelists of her generation starts to apprentice herself to the living land, drawing insight and guidance from the other animals, plants, fungal webs, landforms, and inscrutable weather patterns. Using her writing to weave her way, spider-wise, into the polymorphic web of what is, Sophie Strand slowly comes to sense herself as an exuberant expression of the breathing earth, and her body—even in its glitching confusion—as finest medicine."
—David Abram, Author of the The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal
—David Abram, Author of the The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal
"Be ready. Here is a graced and feral prophecy, one that breaches our comforting sense of separate skins. With her winged prose, Sophie Strand unweaves outworn binaries of sickness and health, healing and decline, even aliveness and death. Mothwings, woodchuck nibbles, starlight, the fungus beneath our calloused feet—all of these gather to sing a wild new sacrament, baptizing readers in the unruly and beautiful earthen ecologies that make us truly whole."
—Lyanda Haupt, Author of Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit
"In this prophetic, gorgeously written memoir, Strand tells one young woman’s story of confronting mysterious, life-threatening illness, and her efforts to transcend the toxic positivity of the current healing establishment, in which curing equals success. She brings shamanic intensity to her narrative and in a voice that is entirely her own, bridging mythology, medicine, ecology, neuroscience, literature and cultural commentary in a thoroughly original book that deserves a place on your shelf next to Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. Strand is a literary alchemist, a transformer of pain into beauty, capable of revealing profound, brilliant links between the personal and the planetary in language that tears your heart out. The Body is a Doorway brims with passionate complexity. I could not put it down."
—Mark Matousek, Author of Sex Death Enlightenment and Lessons From an American Stoic: How Emerson Can Change Your Life
"In language as alive as the wind, as sparkling as the river, as wise as the owl, as connected as the funghi and as illuminating as the mountain, The Body Is a Doorway invites us to reimagine ourselves, our bodies, and our humanness beyond the limited narratives we've been given, clearing a path to deeper presence and aliveness. Through expansive, ecological storytelling, Sophie Strand reminds us what becomes possible when we cease the endless quest for wellness and return to the wisdom, wonder, and wildness of our bodies."
—Lisa Olivera, Author of Already Enough
"Sophie Strand is a magnificent weaver of words and worlds. In 'The Body is a Doorway,' she invites us through the portal of her lived experience, and re-earths us of all that we have forgotten. This is no small thing in this distracted world. When I read her, I remember what it is to be truly here. And I feel welcome inside of all of it. This book is yet another revelatory work from this remarkable soul."
—Jeff Brown, Author of Hearticulations and Grounded Spirituality
"This book is a doorway of no return back into the entangled and enchanted, the pheremonal and phenomenal, the cellular and cosmic, the rhizomatic and territorial. Strand deconstructs and re-writes neoliberal notions of health and wellbeing through deep personal, multi-sensory inquiry and physical hardship. She is a somatic and literary cartographer to deeper bodily truths. Those whom society deems "unwell" may be the sentinel species of our times, reminding us of our ignored but unbroken umbilical cord to the broader ecology. The living world is reflecting back to us who we are, and our survival will depend on heeding the omens of our bodies, our embedded communities and our nesting environments. The human, like the body itself, is not singular. It never has been. It's a cacophony of pluralities, a multiverse of beings negotiating the quicksand of capitalist modernity. No body will be unscathed in the cartographical shuffle of history making. Let this book be a portend and a guide."
—Alnoor Ladha, Co-founder of Culture Hack Labs and co-author, Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse
—Alnoor Ladha, Co-founder of Culture Hack Labs and co-author, Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse
"Sophie Strand once again wrote something that will make you feel enchanted and whole no matter your circumstances. The Body Is A Doorway will break your heart and help you put it back together, feeling powerful and connected in even the worst of times. A must read for those of us who are sick, as well as anyone who loves us or might become sick one day."
—Cassandra Snow, Author of Queering the Tarot and Lessons From the Empress