"At age twenty-one, just starting to comprehend the usual puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with yet another: a wildly unpredictable disease that appeared without warning. It tore through her twenties, vanishing and then returning, often paralyzing her for weeks at a time. The experience left Manguso first to expect nothing from her life, and then, furiously, to expect everything." "In wry and unsentimental prose, Manguso recounts her nine-year struggle with this enigmatic affliction and its treatments, from emergency blood cleansings and collapsed veins to addiction and depression, to perhaps the unkindest cut of all for a writer - the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. Ultimately, though, hers is not so much a chronicle of triumph or tragedy as it is simply a story about learning to pay attention. And in so doing, Manguso manages with tremendous grace and self-awareness to train our eyes anew on the very notion of illness and survival."--BOOK JACKET.