Welcome to My Country Welcome to My Country: Journeys into the World of a Therapist and Her Patients
Lauren Slater

Monday, July 7, 2003

As she does in Prozac Diary, Slater tends toward being overly precious or poetic at times. Here's an example. She starts out pretty matter-of-fact:

I recalled reading of a man lying on an operating table.... In the patient's head was a hole caused by a cancer that had eaten through the patient's scalp, revealing the brain, gray and pink, surrounded by cerebral fluid that now and then burbled over and dripped down the man's stripped scalp. When that happened, one of the attending nurses would dab at the wound with a sterile cloth, wiping away the wetness.

Now here (a few pages later) is where she gets carried away:

I saw again the hole in that man's head, the way the fluid had edged over, how the nurses wiped it up. Maybe, instead, they should have gathered the fluid in cupped hands, lifted it to their lips, tasting within it a briny memory of how we are born howling, a salty nerve cell, a whole network of nerves whose purpose is pleasure but also pain, without which we are not who we are -- human.

See, her narrative carries me along until I get to a passage like that, and then I roll my eyes and sigh, "Oh, please." This is the kind of writing that would probably have thrilled me 15 or even 10 years ago. That ornate, edging into fairytale, Jeanette Winterson-esque quality. But these days I find I want things presented more simply, more haiku than sonnet, perhaps.