This year I published my second novel, a story about a girl with scoliosis. History Lesson for Girls is not an autobiography, but the scoliosis aspect of the story is inspired by my own experience. I was diagnosed with a curvature of the spine when I was eleven, and wore the Milwaukee brace from then until I was thirteen.

Do people need to suffer to create? Of course not, and yet discovering I had scoliosis and wearing a brace most definitely had something to do with my becoming a writer. The day my parents and I came home from my first appointment with the orthopedic surgeon -- the day I got an X-ray and saw my spine’s eerie tumble into an S-curve for the first time, and the doctor sent us marching off to the brace-maker’s to be fitted for a Milwaukee brace -- was also the day I wrote my first poem.

It’s not that I hadn’t penned a few rhymes before. We’d learned about poetry in school, and both my parents were writers, so the concept of writing was always in the air, books were part of the household. But after that doctor’s appointment, contemplating a future that would involve wearing a brace twenty-three hours a day for what could amount to years, I walked upstairs to my room and closed the door. Like a zombie I got out a notebook and a pen and kneeled in front of my bed. Methodically, somberly, I wrote, trying to make sense of what was happening to me. It was the first time I wrote out of need.

Prior to the diagnosis, I’d had a small, reckless pride in my body. Just a couple of years before, I’d convinced myself that I could learn to jump from any height, you might almost say that I could learn to fly, if I only trained diligently, repeating practice jumps from higher and higher points on a containing wall between our house and the neighbor’s. I’d taken special pleasure in not requiring eyeglasses or braces for my teeth. This freedom from cumbersome medical aids gave me the gleeful feeling that my body was all right just as it was. More than all right: I felt lucky.

Through the months and years to come, it was my unfortunate circumstance to lose this faith in myself and in the physical world. My body had betrayed me; I could no longer rely on it. “Idiopathic” means of no known origin, and that’s the kind of scoliosis I had. Every two months I’d get a new X-ray, and every two months I’d watch the doctor scribble new, higher numbers on the slide, the worsening degrees of my curves. Outwardly I was altered as well. Scoliosis may have been the internal danger, but it was the brace that knocked off my public image. One year after I began wearing it I moved to a new town, and instead of being a normal or even pretty girl, I was viewed (or so I thought) as a freak. A sense of isolation brewed inside me. Would things have been different if I could have relied on my looks, and if the bones inside weren’t shaping me, changing me? The way things turned out, I became more of an observer, with a sense of doubt: two critical aspects for writing.

Thirty years later, I began to get my first ideas for the novel that would become History Lesson for Girls.

My original concept was to write about the friendship between two thirteen-year-old girls trying to survive the 1970s in an affluent Connecticut suburb. Both girls would have hard lives in one way or the other was my thought, and their friendship would be so strong that it could, for a time, save them from confusion and worse. Would Alison have scoliosis, like I’d had? At first I resisted this notion, in part because I didn’t want to get that close to my own life. In the early stages of writing, I even considered giving her some other disability -- something cinematic and romantic, say, like a limp -- but finally I decided what it would have to be. Scoliosis was what I knew and scoliosis was what terrified me, and sometimes as a writer it’s best to head toward what scares you the most.

I learned a few things from returning to this subject. On one level, it was ideal for fiction. Scoliosis never seems to yield to a pat resolution, and easy answers or tie-a-ribbon-around-the-story endings aren’t all that convincing for most readers (and not that fun for writers either). I had to plunge back into the ambiguity of what went on back then, by no means a comfortable experience.

It wasn’t just the diagnosis and the brace that altered the course of my life, but the fact that, after I’d worn the brace for two years, the orthopedist announced that it hadn’t done any good, and he recommended surgery. The operation involved the cutting open of the back and the insertion of a Harrington Rod, a pencil-like metal piece attached to the spine. I would be in a cast for months, bed-bound and out of school for a year. (Today’s surgeries are still extremely serious matters, but if the surgery is successful, which is not always the case, the recovery time is now markedly less.)

In a case of serendipity, my mother received a call that very day from a friend, extolling the healing methods of two reverends giving classes in herbal medicine in the basement of a nearby church. We made an appointment, and before long my parents and I were shaking hands with a young man who had a chiseled, gentle face, and his wife, a round woman with fluffy blond hair and intense eyes. We explained the situation to them, even brought our X-rays. After hearing us out, they suggested a regimen of healthful eating supplemented by vitamins and herbal supplements, exercise (yoga, as well as a few back aligning movements), “laying on of hands” healing, and prayer. Because we were open-minded or because we were desperate, or some combination of both, we decided to follow their recommendations. We found a new orthopedic surgeon willing to monitor my curves as we followed this course. Soon I began to wear the brace only at night. My back didn’t straighten, but it didn’t get worse -- or that much worse -- either. Essentially my condition stabilized, and the doctor approved my taking the brace off completely within the next year. I’ve lived an active life, enjoying sports and most activities, giving birth to a child, and not suffering any chronic discomfort, these three decades since.

Because there was no control experiment -- with the brace, or with the “natural healing” -- it’s impossible to know what really helped and what didn’t. What I do know is that the natural healers gave us the faith we needed to look beyond the initial recommendation for surgery and trust a more conservative approach.

Writing about scoliosis has made me aware again of my back -- literally. (In fact, if I sit here right now and think “scoliosis” my back seems to get more curved -- by far!) What is true is that I came right up against the mystery of many things by having to deal with this -- by the nebulous area between Western medicine and natural healing, by the relationship between faith and wishful thinking, by the stretch between who I thought I was and who I had become, because of circumstances beyond my control. While I wrote that first poem out of need, I wrote the novel not really just for me but also for the others out there. As Alison says in History Lesson for Girls, “I think of the girls with me in the waiting room in New York -- ten girls in braces like ruined circus giraffes. That’s part of history now, but there are other girls, new girls, to remember.”

Copyright © 2007 Aurelie Sheehan

Author
Aurelie Sheehan is the author of the short story collection Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant and the novel The Anxiety of Everyday Objects. The director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, she has received a Pushcart Prize, a Camargo Fellowship, and the Jack Kerouac Literary Award. She lives in Tucson with her husband and daughter.

For more information, please visit www.aureliesheehan.com