Acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt has often written about the mind-body divide, most recently in her novel The Sorrows of an American. That theme takes on personal significance in The Shaking Woman—Hustvedt's engrossing autobiographical search for a diagnosis of her unexplained seizures. Hustvedt will be joined in conversation by Rita Charon, director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.

About The Shaking Woman:
While speaking at a memorial for her father in 2006, Siri Hustvedt suffered a violent seizure from the neck down. Despite her flapping arms and shaking legs, she continued to speak clearly and was able to finish her speech. It was as if she had suddenly become two people: at once a calm orator and a shuddering wreck. Then the seizures began happening again and again. The Shaking Woman tracks Hustvedt's search for a diagnosis. It is a search that takes her inside the thought processes of several scientific disciplines, each one offering a distinct perspective on her paroxysms but no ready solution. In the process, Siri finds herself entangled in fundamental questions: What is the relationship between brain and mind? How do we remember? What is the self?

About the participants:
Siri Hustvedt is the author of the novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Blindfold, and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, among others, as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Paul Auster.

Rita Charon is a general internist and literary scholar at Columbia University. She created a field of clinical pratice called Narrative Medicine, a medicine fortified with the knowledge of what to do with stories. With colleagues she founded a Masters of Science in Narrative Medicine graduate program which has engaged clinicians, patients, and students world-wide in the effort to give and receive accounts of self in the spheres of illness. Charon's book Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stoires of Illness appeared in 2006 published by Oxford Univ. Press.