Listen free for 30 days
-
The Camera My Mother Gave Me
- Narrated by: Susanna Kaysen
- Length: 2 hrs and 47 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
The Camera My Mother Gave Me
Buy Now for $20.15
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's Summary
The title comes from Luis Bunuel's film Viridiana. Some peasants are at a banquet in a country mansion. They ask a maid to take a group snapshot, and she obliges, lifting up her skirt and using the "camera" that's underneath.
Kaysen's The Camera My Mother Gave Me observes what happens when sexual pleasure is replaced by pain. "When eros goes away," she writes, "it's as if I'm colorblind. The world is gray." But is this a problem of body, or mind? And can clinicians tease out the difference between the two?
Spare, frank, and altogether original, The Camera My Mother Gave Me challenges us to think in new ways about the centrality and power of sexuality. It is an extraordinary investigation into the role sex plays in perception and our notions of ourselves, and into what happens when the erotic impulse meets the world of medicine.
What the critics say
"Thoughts on sexuality, love, trust, femininity, age, self-image, and the wisdom of the body radiate out from her pain like rays from the sun, touching her rapt, sympathetic, and often amused readers with the heat and light of her hard-won insights and candor." (Booklist)