If writing about income inequality often orients toward big-picture prescriptives, then Having and Being Had invests in transparency and self-scrutiny. Elsewhere, she surveys how slavery and marriage made people into objects.

In one section, Biss writes about her real estate agent, who is “forbidden by law” to discuss demographics while selling homes in a neighborhood where redlining once “translated race into property value.” In another, she reintroduces Virginia Woolf as both literary model and cautionary tale.

In bringing an ostensibly crip methodology to bear on readings of chronic pain, I hope to invigorate discussions on reading, writing and knowing chronic pain in the critical medical humanities.The book’s focus on everyday life-a game of Monopoly, weekend yard work, new Ikea furniture-is undergirded by an inquiry into history, literature, and economics. Rather than bowing to the impulse to impose false coherence on my reading of Biss and Huber, my article foregrounds the impact of the re-reading, misreading, cognitive dissonance and breaks necessitated by chronic pain and processing delays on this analysis. The article’s analysis draws on my personal experience of chronic pain, neurodivergence and disability to demonstrate the generativity of an embodied approach to literary analysis. For Biss, this surfaces as a quiet critique of numbers and a disturbance of their fixity, while Huber’s criticism employs the motif of pain’s legibility across multiple bodies to spell out alternative meanings of chronic pain.Ĭrucially, this article proposes a crip and embodied approach for reading and responding to accounts of chronic pain’s measurement, including Biss’ and Huber’s literary accounts, and the biomedical account of pains scales which this article reads alongside them. Considering both texts as cripistemologies of chronic pain, my literary analysis attends to their criticism of the pain scale, including its implicit reliance on imagination and memory, and how its unidimensionality and synchronic focus prove inadequate for lasting pain. Establishing first a brief history of methods attempting to quantify pain before my close reading, I read both Biss’ and Huber’s accounts as performative explorations of the limitations of using linear pain scales for pain which is recursive and enduring. This article analyses the literary representation of pain scales and assessment in two chronic pain narratives: ‘The Pain Scale’, a lyric essay by Eula Biss, and essays from Sonya Huber’s collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System.

Having and being had by eula biss