A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary

Andrew Levy

May 2009 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

With more than one in ten Americans -- and more than one in five families -- affected, the phenomenon of migraine is widely prevalent and often ignored or misdiagnosed. By his mid-forties, Andrew Levy's migraines were occasional reminders of a persistent illness that he'd wrestled with half his life, though he had not fully contemplated their physical and psychological influence on the individual, family, and society at large. Then in 2006 Levy was struck almost daily by a series of debilitating migraines that kept him essentially bedridden for months, imprisoned by pain and nausea that retreated only briefly in gentler afternoon light.

When possible, Levy kept careful track of what triggered an onset -- the "thin, taut" pain from drinking a bourbon, the stabbing pulse brought on by a few too many M&M's -- and in luminous prose recounts his struggle to live with migraines, his meticulous attempts at calibrating his lifestyle to combat and avoid them, and most tellingly, the personal relationship a migraineur develops -- an almost Stockholm syndrome-like attachment -- with the indescribable pain, delirium, and hallucinations.

Levy read about personalities and artists throughout history with migraine -- Alexander Pope, Nietzsche, Freud, Virginia Woolf, even Elvis -- and researched the treatments and medical advice available for migraine sufferers. He candidly describes his rehabilitation with the aid of prescription drugs and his eventual reemergence into the world, back to work and writing. An enthralling blend of memoir and provocative analysis, A Brain Wider Than the Sky offers rich insights into an illness whose effects are too often discounted and whose sufferers are too often overlooked.

Ratings and reviews

The author seems bent on funding a way to convince (himself, readers) that migraines have a silver lining, some meaning that makes them worthwhile. They don't. The authors' descriptions of historical figures with migraines doesn't change that. The book also maintains a thread of condescension in its portrayal of those migraineurs who have not found a treatment that works, even while quoting statistics showing that the available treatments at best help only some people to have some reduction in migraines.

About the author

Andrew Levy is Edna Cooper Chair in English at Butler University. He is author of the critically acclaimed Brain Wider Than the Sky, and the award-winning biography The First Emancipator.