Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
A Brain Wider than the Sky: A Migraine
Diary
by Andrew Levy, Simon & Schuster 2009
Reviewed by Chad Bauman
In this book, recently named one of the best
memoirs of 2009 by the Washington Post, Andrew Levy
attempts to convey the shape, flow, and sensation of migraines to
his readers. And in this, he succeeds brilliantly (in the
interest of full disclosure, Levy is a colleague of mine at Butler
University). Yet Levy's memoir is also about the terrifying
privacy of a migraine. Migraine descriptions are metaphorical
at best, and migraines are ultimately nontransferable; they isolate
and discriminate. Levy explores the damaging effects of this
isolation on his psyche, his relationships, and his ability to
perform the roles of professor, parent, and spouse. But this
very same isolation drives Levy, while suffering through a
particularly enervating four months of daily migraines, to begin
reading more about the science and history of migraines, as well as
about other migraineurs. A Brain Wider than the Sky
distills that information, mixing and integrating it with a moving
narrative of the author's own experiences with
migraine.
One in ten Americans are sufferers of migraine, and migraineurs
are even well represented among those so famous they require only
one name: Jefferson, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Elvis, Nietzsche, and
Joan (of Arc). This list, then, makes plain the paradox of
migraines-that despite their isolating and debilitating effects,
migraines seem somehow, at least for some, a font of
inspiration. Levy's departing migraines leave him refreshed,
his mind buzzing with potential and urging him to create and
connect-to his own mind, to others, to nature. A Brain
Wider than the Sky is not, therefore, a complaint, but rather
an exploration, a meditation, and through it Levy seems to come to
terms with his migraines, and even, perhaps, with his own human
frailty. So too, I suspect, will many of his
readers.
- Chad Bauman is an assistant professor of religion at Butler
University.