Maureen Corrigan

Goodman herself is pretty marcescent as a writer.

She holds fast to the gifts that have marked her since her earliest books, psychological acuity, humor, and an abiding curiosity about the volatile chemistry of people bound together by affinity, profession, or blood.

One morning in January 2006, Rachel Weaver, a 20-something aspiring writer who was about to start grad school in Colorado, woke up to a hurricane, except the hurricane was whirling within her own body.

Here's how Weaver describes that moment.

I opened my eyes to the walls of the bedroom, folding and sliding and picking up speed.

I pressed my body hard against the mattress in search of the center, the still place, any place.

Desperate to get away from whatever was happening, I pushed the covers off inch by inch, keeping my head as still as possible, and slid down to all fours next to the bed.

I was clawing more than crawling, the carpet rushing beneath my hands like a river just let loose from a dam.

In the hallway, panting, I slowly got my feet under me, crouched low, hands spidered against the carpet.

If I could just brush my teeth, maybe have some coffee, I figured things would right themselves.

Things didn't even start to right themselves for Weaver until about a decade later, when she met a doctor who, instead of trying to make her symptoms fit a prefab narrative, sat with her for two hours and asked question after question like a detective on the path of a hardened criminal.

In her arresting new memoir called Dizzy, Weaver herself deftly avoids the prefab narrative that accounts of deliverance from chronic illness usually fall into.

There's even a name for them.

They're called restitution narratives because the reward in reading such stories is the return to some degree of normal life.

Think, for instance, of the monthly diagnosis column in the New York Times magazine, whose appeal is based on the promise that some solution will be found by the end of its investigation of a mystery disease.

Weaver takes a more challenging approach.

She devotes all but the very last pages of her book to the extended experience of being marooned, as she puts it, in the windy no-man's land of what could possibly be wrong with me.

To me, reading Dizzy is akin to the slowed-down sensation of reading Robinson Crusoe.

Year after year goes by.

Occasionally, Rescue appears on the horizon in the form of an ear, nose, and throat specialist, acupuncturist, neurologist, physical therapist, ophthalmologist, chiropractic integrative healer.