In May 2006 Siri Hustvedt took to the podium to commemorate her father's death two years before. A seasoned public speaker, the New York-based author of such celebrated novels as What I Loved, Sorrows of An American and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl was addressing family and friends in her hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, when she was suddenly seized by violent convulsions.
Her mother likened it to witnessing an electrocution, says Hustvedt, who describes it in her new non-fiction work, The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves, as if 'some unknown force had taken over my body and decided I needed a good sustained jolt'.
Thus Hustvedt's quest to find 'the shaking woman' as she calls this strange new shuddering self, in her book of the same name.
Part memoir, part medical mystery, it is an unusual, provocative and cerebral book that is already creating waves in the literary and scientific realms. A longtime sufferer of migraine and mirror touch synaesthesia, an extreme form of empathy, Hustvedt is no stranger to what she calls her 'neurological oddities'.
She recalls years ago when her left arm jerked upward and slammed her into the wall, a precursor to a migraine that lasted almost a year. Her acclaimed fiction too, has long been coloured by an inquiry into the nature of mind and body. But the convulsions were something new.
'In some ways [the book] was born of a need for mastery,' she says. 'It was that sense of if you can't cure yourself then you can at least try to understand it, and I wrote it as it happened. So there was a sense of immediacy about the story that was kind of fun.'