Drunk on Ink Q & A with Sonya Huber and “Drunk Women Takes Your Keys’

Sonya Huber is the author of five books, including Opa Nobody, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, and the new essay collection Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. She teaches at Fairfield University, where she directs the low-residency MFA program. She is a displaced Midwesterner, mom, Buddhist, loud-laughter, and says “dude” and “awesome” much more than she should.

About Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and the Other Essays from a Nervous System

Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays about living with chronic pain. Sonya Huber moves away from a linear narrative to step through the doorway into pain itself, into that strange, unbounded reality. Although the essays are personal in nature, this collection is not a record of the author’s specific condition but an exploration that transcends pain’s airless and constraining world and focuses on its edges from wild and widely ranging angles.

Huber addresses the nature and experience of invisible disability, including the challenges of gender bias in our health care system, the search for effective treatment options, and the difficulty of articulating chronic pain. She makes pain a lens of inquiry and lyricism, finds its humor and complexity, describes its irascible character, and explores its temperature, taste, and even its beauty.

In the intricate web of society, where individuals navigate their lives amidst pain’s unpredictable and enigmatic presence, urgent care centers play a vital role in providing relief and support. They become the pivotal bridges between the complexities of chronic pain and the quest for accessible and effective treatment options. Just as Sonya Huber artfully delves into pain’s multifaceted nature, MyDoc Urgent Care Jackson Heights NY, embraces a similar ethos of compassion and understanding. These centers become beacons of hope for those struggling with invisible disabilities, as they address the challenges of gender bias in healthcare and offer a diverse range of solutions for those seeking solace from their afflictions. Through their patient-centered approach and commitment to exploring pain’s myriad facets, urgent care centers like MyDoc become indispensable partners in the journey towards improved well-being and, ultimately, a better understanding of the complexities that encompass the human experience.

SONIAH KAMAL: First author/book you read/fell in love with?

SONYA HUBER: Oh my gosh…. My first true love of an author was George Orwell. It was when I read 1984 in high school that I fully understood exactly how deep an author could get into my head and heart. What Orwell does with language continues to thrill and inspire me.

To unwind: chai, coffee, water, wine?

Coffee

A novel, short story, poem, essay, anything you believe should be mandatory reading?

Right now I think Orwell’s “The Politics of the English Language” should be wallpapered everywhere.

Any classic you wished you’d pushed through in your teens?

I really really wish I would have read Portrait of a Lady by Henry James because I needed that kind of warning about dysfunctional relationships and how a woman could be almost consumed by a controlling man.

A favorite quote from your book 

“The pain-woman speaks in a pared-down voice; she is a dreamy laser. You can’t tell her a single thing. She has room for only one emergency. She has to creep slowly and hold onto the back of chairs as she moves, but she has a strange superpower. She cares more about the vulnerable soft flesh of everyone more than my normal busy pre-pain self.

She aches in slow motion for everyone’s crumbling life.”

 

Your favorite book to film

I can’t think of one!

Favorite Indie Book Store/s?

Women and Children First in Chicago. Also the Strand in New York.

The one think you wish you’d known about the writing life?

I wish I’d known that I was as good a writer as anyone else. I gave up on writing after I graduated college because I thought I was lacking something essential. I later learned that the only thing writing requires is persistence, plus a brash ability to bother strangers.

Does writing/publishing/marketing get any easier with each story/novel published?

I think each book offers its own problems and challenges, and at a certain point (or many points) in the middle of each book, those problems appear to be practically impossible to solve. But what I think gets easier is the routine of working through a book; the general feeling of being lost inside a book comes to feel more familiar and even becomes comfortable as a place to live rather than as a crisis. I think each round of book marketing is as challenging as the first time, but I know not to just appear at a bookstore and hope people will show up.

Dog, Cat, Or?  

Both!

Favorite book cover?

The cover of Lynda Barry’s What It Is, a beautiful hand-drawn and hand-painted sea of monkeys and fire and sea creatures and other images.

Favorite song?

“No Depression” by Uncle Tupelo

Ideal Vacation? 

My ideal vacation would be to go to a literary city (maybe London) and just have time all by myself to write and to wander around museums, do research, etc. BUT I would also love to go to India someday, or Greece! So many places I haven’t been.

Favorite work of art?

This is a terribly difficult question. I will have to say that when it comes right down to it, I always go back to the box assemblages made by Joseph Cornell.

What is your favorite Austen novel and film adaptation?

I have to say my favorite film adaptation is Sense and Sensibility because: Emma Thompson. As far as the novels themselves, I loved Mansfield Park for its social critique.

Favorite Small Press and Literary Journal?

University of Nebraska Press! And I love Brevity: A Journal of Concise Nonfiction.

Last impulse book buy and why?

I took a trip to Mass Museum of Contemporary Art and bought a thick book entitled Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder. It’s a miraculous hodgepodge of images, interviews, and ideas that all circle around the concept of wonder, which I love.

More Drunk on Ink Interviews:

Mike Chen: Here and Now and Then, a novel

Ruth Franklin: Shirley Jackson A Rather Haunted Life, biography

Colleen Oakley: Before I Go, a novel

Emily Midorikawa: A Secret Sisterhood: The literary friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, biography

Shabnam Samuel: A Fractured Life, memoir

Elise Hooper: The Other Alcott, a novel

Anne Boyd Rioux: Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, non fiction

Devoney Looser: The Making of Jane Austen, non fiction

Kristen Miller Zohn: The Currency of Taste- Gibbons Georgian Silver, coffee table book

Vanessa Hua, A River of Stars, novel

Chaitli Sen, The Pathless Sky, novel

Sonya Huber, Pain Woman Take Your Keys, memoir

Kathy Wilson Florence, Three of Cups, a novel

Sara Luce Look, Charis Books and More, independent book store

S J Sindu, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, a novel

Rosalie Morales Kearns, Kingdom of Men, a novel

Saadia Faruqi, Meet Yasmin, children’s literature

Rene Denfeld: The Child Finder, a novel

Jamie Brenner, The Husband Hour, a novel

Sara Marchant, The Driveway has Two Sides, memoir

Kirsten Imani Kasai, The House of Erzulie, a novel

Thrity Umrigar, The Secrets Between Us, novel

John Kessel, Pride and Prometheus, novel

Lisa Romeo, Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter’s Memoir of Love After Loss

Rachel May, An American Quilt: Unfolding a Story of Family and Slavery

Rebecca Entel, Fingerprints of Previous Owners, novel

Jamie Sumner, Unbound: Finding from Unrealistic Expectations of Motherhood

Falguni Kothari, My Last Love Story, novel

Tanaz Bathena, A Girl Like That, YA novel