Synopsis:
While speaking about her father, Siri Hustvedt found herself a victim of the shudders. Was it a hysterical seizure or a bizarre form of panic attack? Her exploration unearths theories and stories from the annals of medical history, contemporary brain research, as well as literature and philosophy. This is a book about the mysteries of illness and the complexities of diagnosis. In "The Shaking Woman," Hustvedt synthesizes her personal experience into a seamless narrative that investigates the age-old dilemmas of the mental and the physical, the mind and the body, and what it means to be human.

From the author:
Siri Hustvedt's first novel, "The Blindfold," was published in 1993. Since then, she has published "The Enchantment of Lily Dahl," "What I Loved," "The Sorrows of an American," "The Summer Without Men," and "The Blazing World," which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. She is also the author of the poetry collection "Reading To You," and four collections of essays: "Yonder," "Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting," "A Plea for Eros," and "Living, Thinking, Looking," as well as the memoir "The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves." Born in Minnesota, Siri Hustvedt now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and in 2012 was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. She delivered the Schelling Lecture in Aesthetics in Munich in 2010, the Freud Lecture in Vienna in 2011, and the opening keynote at the conference to mark Kierkegaard's 200th anniversary in Copenhagen in 2013, while her latest honorary doctorate is from the University of Gutenberg in Germany. She is also a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for various publications and exhibition catalogues.