Chronic: A Memoir

Dimyan debuts with a frank if uneven account of her struggles with endometriosis. As a Boston University freshman, Dimyan visited Planned Parenthood to get a prescription for birth control pills when she and her boyfriend started having sex. Unbeknownst to her, the medication kept her as yet undiagnosed endometriosis at bay. At 22, however, she began experiencing painful intercourse, and—having grown up in a Catholic household where sex wasn’t much talked about—she grew certain that the “pain was karmic,” as she’d begun cheating on her boyfriend. The pain persisted well past that affair, though, and Dimyan brutally recounts grinding years of misdiagnoses with ailments including untreated STDs, ruptured cysts, and IBS, mostly from physicians unfamiliar with endometriosis, a disease that causes the growth of uterine tissue outside of the uterus. Dimyan’s chronic pain wreaked havoc on her 20s as she completed graduate school, began teaching university writing classes, and met her future husband, all through a haze of extreme discomfort. At 29, after she’d tried Eastern medicine and gluten-free eating to relieve her symptoms, Dimyan’s gynecologist finally landed on the correct diagnosis via laparoscopic surgery. The chapters about Dimyan’s college life and sexual experiences are candid and effective, and she forcefully renders the agony of her medical purgatory, but the book’s brevity and midway pivot to self-help territory make it feel underdeveloped. In the crowded field of medical memoirs, this fails to stand out. (June)