Sonata

March 13, 2017
In 1989, at the age of 12, Avery was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. She was also a promising pianist. This excellent memoir illuminates both elements of her life with equal dignity and insight. Readers will gladly follow along as the author, now an English teacher in Phoenix, Ariz., recounts a detailed description of her symptoms, treatments, and the numerous medical procedures she endured. The memoir is also a love story to playing the piano, which Avery began when she was seven years old. The author notes she had a “few years’ grace” before the disease severely interfered with her playing. Her battle was both physical and psychological. After failing a piano exam, Avery explains, “I was fine with having arthritis myself, but for the first time I had infected the music. Now it was arthritic, too.” Avery delves into how her disease complicated the normal chaotic process of growing up, dating, sex, and college. She also deftly narrates the remarkable stories of Paul Wittgenstein, a one-armed pianist, and Franz Schubert, who composed his sonata in B-flat while dying from syphilis, revealing how she used these men’s stories and music as sources of inspiration. Her story offers inspiration, and education on building a beautiful and meaningful life even when what you love most slips away.

March 15, 2017
A high school English teacher, musician, and essayist emotionally and analytically chronicles her journey through the tangled wood of rheumatoid arthritis.Avery enjoyed about 12 years of -normal- life before the disease began to manifest itself, and she received her stern diagnosis in 1989. She was a gifted pianist, but the disease attacked her body relentlessly, including, of course, her hands. In this debut memoir, the author organizes her text like a sonata--in movements, each of which has chapters--and her love of music is patent on almost every page. Late in the book is one dazzling paragraph about an insensitive physical therapist, a paragraph into which she has inserted cues for musical instruments. Appearing like motifs are Schubert, Mozart, Wittgenstein, and others, whose words and biographies appear continually. The author also alludes to and quotes from texts about music and illness and mentions numerous others for various expository reasons--e.g., Flannery O'Connor and Susan Sontag--but it's a particular Schubert sonata that appeals to her in youth and beyond. Avery also writes frankly about her family (parents divorced, etc.) and her older siblings, one of whom the author viewed as a competitor. The initial bitterness eventually sweetens, and her tone is more conciliatory near the end. But as much as this is the story of Avery's mind and psychology, it is even more so the story of her adjustments to her traitorous body, to how people perceive her, that composes the capacious heart of this narrative. Through it all--her body's betrayals, the numerous and various surgeries--we see a bright, determined person trying to come to peace with herself and with a world that is not always kind. A wrenching account of a writer determined to maintain the music of her life in whatever forms are possible.

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April 1, 2017
Most of us take our health for granted, but what if, for most of your life, you were subjected to interminable pain and surgery after surgery? This is what Avery chronicles in her memoir of living with a chronic illness: rheumatoid arthritis. Her life changed forever in May 1989, when, at 12 years of age, she received the official diagnosis and her body turned on itself, attacking her joints, muscles, bones, and tendons. There were plenty of moments when the symptoms disappeared, only to return again with a vengeance. Music helped save her lifespecifically, playing the piano and, even more specifically, Schubert's sonata in B-flat D960. By the time she was a teenager and the disease had ravaged her hands, she knew nothing better than the piano. I loved nothingno onemore. Her fingers were extraordinarily good before they became extraordinarily bad. Despite her devastating condition, Avery makes it clear that her illness does not define who she is. She may be always sick, but, as she notes, she is not sickly. A moving memoir of living with pain, and with music.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)