This Is the Door - by Darcey Steinke (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

"It's a blessing to live while Darcey Steinke is writing." -- Maggie Nelson

Darcey Steinke, acclaimed author of Flash Count Diary and Suicide Blonde, explores the world of pain for those who suffer and those who love them.

Steinke gets to the heart of pain with her usual brilliance, humor, candor, and empathy. In chapters that trace the body--The Spine, The Heart, The Knees, and more--she introduces sufferers to new and ancient understandings of pain through history, philosophy, religion, pop culture, and reported human experience. Leaving no stone unturned, Steinke takes readers under the knife, through the archives, and across oceans. She interviews working physicians, analyzes the writings of Frida Kahlo, recounts her own back surgery, and journeys to Lourdes, where she finds herself invited to participate in the famed pilgrimage site's rituals.
For readers of Joan Didion, C. S. Lewis, Sheila Heti, and Leslie Jamison, This Is the Door beautifully illuminates the experience of pain and its myriad effects on the body, mind, and soul. Whether you are hurting or know someone who is, whether your pain is somatic or spiritual, This Is the Door is a revelation.

Review Quotes

"It's a blessing to live while Darcey Steinke is writing, as This Is the Door makes abundantly clear. Our era may be replete with testimony--and scientific inquiry--into the nature of pain, but no book has yet appeared on the subject with the same spiritual curiosity, lightly-worn erudition, and tender fellow-feeling as Darcey Steinke's This Is the Door. Kurt Cobain, Audre Lorde, Nietzsche, Simone Weil, the author's father--all are here, along with many more, in a tapestry that makes the reader feel less alone in embodied life, here rendered as both excruciating and holy." - Maggie Nelson, bestselling author of Bluets and The Argonauts
"This Is the Door is a work of piercing grace, philosophical wisdom, and rare emotional power. By tracing the history of her own body and spirit, as well as studying the suffering of others, Steinke shows us how physical pain and spiritual faith inform and influence each other. This is a work of art that could only have emerged from the crucible of truth. It's absolutely beautiful." - Elizabeth Gilbert, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and All the Way to the River
"A riveting, roving, deeply humane tour through the body's capacity for pain--essential reading for anyone who has known the loneliness (and sometimes ecstasy) of suffering, and wishes to meet the ancient and astute lineages to which they belong." - Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Girlhood and The Dry Season
"Part philosophical meditation, part personal history, This is the Door is a riveting exploration of what it means to be a body in and out of pain. In this eloquent and wide-ranging book, Steinke illuminates the darkest, most private corners of human experience with enormous generosity and grace." - Jenny Offill, New York Times bestselling author of Weather
"Nobody but Darcey Steinke could have written This Is The Door--a profoundly passionate love letter to the body in pain, moving from the clinical to the ecstatic. She meditates on how we get transformed--or even enraptured--by suffering, on the medical, spiritual, and artistic levels. But she faces it with all her raw candor and graceful wit, searching for ways pain can become a kind of revelation." - Rob Sheffield, New York Times bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape
"How to articulate the experience of reading a book that so completely altered--even saved--my relationship to my body and to a lifetime of severe pain? Through a gripping combination of memoir, history, and reportage, Darcey Steinke leads the reader through the door of human understanding about suffering and pain to find healing and transcendence. Steinke's revelatory, lucid prose illuminates the paths others have found through life's darkest landscapes--grief and heartbreak, pain and suffering, dying and death--leading the reader to find their own way to the other side." - Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis
"This Is the Door is a luminous exploration of the anatomy of suffering, giving language to experiences that often resist articulation. Steinke draws on art, theology, and science to illuminate the strange thresholds pain opens in us. Brave, searching, and deeply humane, this beautiful book reframes how we understand not only pain, but the mystery of embodiment itself." - Meghan O'Rourke, New York Times bestselling author of The Invisible Kingdom
"Full of wisdom both ancient and cutting-edge, Darcey Steinke's glorious This Is the Door is part lyrical memoir, part fascinating research project, and wholly comforting for anyone grappling with questions of what it means to suffer and to love." - Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can't Sleep and Also a Poet
"This is the Door is a visceral meditation, exploring not only the often wordless anatomy of pain but also the lonely, howling journey of it and through it. 'Will the world ever accept that our bodies are in need of care?' Pain has a way of seizing our attention, but so does the relief of it, and this book will help anyone who's known what it is to live within pain feel seen and understood--qualities so needed as we ache in isolation, misdiagnosis, and helplessness. Thank you for this incredible excavation of pain, healing, and our sweet, tender human form." - Tia Levings, New York Times bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife
"The most honest, searching, and profound meditation I have read in quite some time on what it means to live in a body. Darcey Steinke writes with courage, humility, and vulnerability. What a precious book this is." - Lauren Elkin, author of Scaffolding and Art Monsters
"'Suffering separates you from the world you knew and pushes you into a limbo between what was and what might be. Prayer and meditation are attempts to make a space inside the claustrophobia of suffering, to cut the cut.' Those words from This Is the Door are as wise as any I've read lately, and this svelte work is full to bursting with such wisdom." - Paul Elie, author of The Last Supper
"This Is the Door leads us on a sacred journey. It is a book about pain and the body and all the stuff we necessarily call 'holy.' It is beautiful, and thoughtful, and learned, and funny. It is inspired. Read it, and find yourself in its rare and manifest waters." - Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses' Bridles
"This Is the Door is a thrilling examen of the body in pain. Like Simone Weil, Darcey Steinke writes from the places where pain becomes perception. But where Weil taught the purity of suffering, Steinke attends to the body's graces, restoring its lost companions of gentleness, self-care, and pleasure." - Charles Marsh, author of Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"By identifying and sharing the source and the meaning of pain, whether in the body, mind or soul, Darcey has demystified this universal but elusively IN-describable experience. Darcey's own deeply affecting experiences of pain - whether a romantic break up, a parent's death or her own enduring medical condition - form the foundation for the richness, scope and breath-taking originality of her research. Powered by the clarity and luminescence of her writing, her narrative covers the cultural, scientific, philosophical, religious, medical and practical, and offers both healing and hope in abundance. Both as a sufferer and as a reader, I was completely immersed, moved and exhilarated by this wonderful book." - Juliet Nicolson, author of A House Full of Daughters