Ten Questions for Jen Soriano
What inspired you to tell this story? A lot of sleepless nights lying awake in pain! And Audre Lorde, whose book The Cancer Journals, was the first book that showed me a model of how to blend personal illness narrative with political analysis and purpose. In The Cancer Journals Audre Lorde wrote, “I had known the pain, and survived it. It only remained for me to give it voice, to share it for use, that the pain not be wasted.” I was thankfully not suffering from cancer, but I was living with invisible and debilitating chronic pain that seemed to demand a form of expression. So I took Lorde’s line as a mandate. How could I give voice to my pain and share it, so that it would not be wasted? Also, I wrote this book to be my own witness and advocate for integrative health. I wanted to assemble a meaningful narrative about the chronic pain and mental health challenges I had experienced for most of my life, a deeper narrative than I ever …