Final Essay: Exploring the Unique Usage of Braided Narratives 

by Elia O’Hara 5/7/24

In examining the rhetorical strategy of braided narratives utilized within four authors’ patient narratives, we can compare and contrast how each author uniquely utilizes this choice and how it raises their narrative to a more extensive discussion of patienthood. The four patient narratives that illuminate the powerful addition of a braided narrative are those of Jennifer Lunden’s American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain, Jennifer Soriano’s Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing and lastly, Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. While these authors share a similar entry point from their rhetorical choice of a woven narrative, they diverge as each author uses this overarching framework to work through their experiences with illness. For example, Lunden, Norman, and Bailey provide in-depth analytical research and parallel narratives of other individuals and animals, while Soriano adds a historical commentary on postcolonial legacies. While we might expect a typical patient narrative to be primarily concerned with each experience of patienthood, these four authors assert a compelling strategy that expands their illness in a greater understanding of the power of narrative and lived experiences surrounding healthcare.

First, we can explore the woven narrative Jennifer Lunden utilizes in her book American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. While we only examined a few select chapters of Lunden’s book, she begins her very first chapter, “Bankruptcy,” with the story of Alice James, the sister of well-known Victorian-era writer Henry James. As Lunden begins to connect her journey with chronic fatigue syndrome, CFS, to Alice’s, she writes, “Ninety-nine years before I was born, Alice James collapsed. She was nineteen years old in 1868, two years younger than I would be when illness took me under.”(Lunden 5). Lunden can create this push and pull of the past through her choice of braided narrative as she connects her first encounter with chronic illness to Alice’s diagnosis of neurasthenia. Not only does this validate Alice’s experience from a hundred years prior, but it showcases how the stories of others can impact patients’ ability to cope and provide a sense of distance needed to work through illness. For example, Lunden clearly explains: “I didn’t know then that the book was treasure in my hands. It would become my company, my work, my healing”(Lunden 4). As the framework of this book was such an essential part of Lunden’s process of working through CFS, from a feeling of companionship to source material for further research, it illuminates how one diary can become a catalyst for a much deeper understanding of the American healthcare system. As Lunden says, “In Alice, I found my Victorian counterpart, my kindred spirit. And somehow, reading about her – bright, witty, proud, and stuck – I began coming unstuck. Why was Alice sick? Why was I?”(Lunden 4). Lunden’s rhetorical choice to incorporate Alice’s narrative alongside her own proves how unique connections found in shared experiences of patienthood offer new perspectives and entry points into the complexities of chronic illness.

Moving into another example of the rhetorical choice of a braided narrative, we can look at Abby Norman’s patient narrative Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain. Like Lunden, Norman employs impressive research and a woven narrative of another female figure influential to her illness. For instance, Norman discusses, “When I happened upon Gilda Radner’s memoir several years ago, in the midst of my own medical turmoil, I grew deeply concerned about her life”(Norman 20). In providing this framework early in her narrative, Norman’s choice to weave in Gilda Radner’s story sets up a significant theme of believing in women’s pain that draws us to a more extensive critique of women’s experience within the healthcare setting. Norman then expresses, “Radner’s story haunted me, not because she was some comedic legend whose life was cut short, or just because she died from cancer in her ovaries, but because she had died as a result of her doctors not believing her when she said she was unwell”(Norman 21). As Norman’s book delves into her struggle with endometriosis, making the connection to another woman in history whose pain was dismissed and whose experience was made trivial raises an essential question about the diseases themselves or their realities as women. Gilda’s harrowing story of progressively becoming sicker and being told it was all in her head, alongside Norman’s account of then assuming the role of a doctor to find answers herself, highlights the weight and responsibility women feel to advocate for themselves. Norman writes, “If I, or any other woman whose gynecological cancers or pathologies had gone undiagnosed, had just been sick in some other part of the body, in some other way, would it have been any different?”(Norman 23). Through Norman’s use of a braided narrative, she extends her experience with endometriosis far beyond one singular encounter. Moreover, she can raise women’s healthcare – especially reproductive healthcare – to expose the deeply troubling biases surrounding women’s pain. Unfortunately, with the addition of Gilda’s narrative, Norman subtly exposes how those biases and disbelief cost her life and could have the same result for countless other women without a structural shift in women’s healthcare. 

While Jen Soriano’s patient narrative, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing, does not invoke the braided narrative of another individual as Lunden’s and Norman’s do, she can weave postcolonial mythology as a rhetorical strategy. As she begins her chapter “Broken Water,” she states, “In Philippine folklore, one of the most fearsome monsters is the manananggal. A beautiful woman by day, the manananggal transforms into a flying predator by night”(Soriano 201). To Soriano, this parallel structure of weaving in the narrative of folklore surrounding the manananggal becomes a powerful and subversive method to work through gender identity and illness, all within the backdrop of postcolonial trauma. For example, Soriano candidly discusses her complex feelings toward having children and can utilize the braided narrative of folklore to express her conflictual feelings. Soriano frames the myth of the manananggal by saying, “Unborn children are her favorite meal. She likes to suck them fresh from the womb”(Soriano 210). Then, immediately following, she recounts, “ ‘When are you going to have kids?’ My coworker Violet asks me”(Soriano 201). Soriano’s decisive move in working through her own gender identity and postcolonial trauma can displace those negative connotations unto the manananggal and provide a sense of freedom to express her fears. Even more specifically, Soriano can use the manananggal to connect the Philippines’ colonial legacy to her experience of patienthood as she asserts, “…repeated exposure to the violations and violence of colonization may have led my ancestors to interpret everything around them as threats. This may be how they survived long enough to have children. I believe I inherited this hypervigilance to the point that this adaptive response became maladaptive in my environment of relative peace”(Soriano 212). Soriano’s choice of braided narrative might be less traditional than Lunden or Norman’s, but invoking folklore and systemic colonial legacies produces a similar result of extending her experience of patienthood to the more extensive discussion of the complex intersections that make up healthcare and gender.

Lastly, we can look at Elizabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating and her unique rhetorical choice of the braided narrative of a snail. A companion and a remarkable source of in-depth scientific research, the structure of her snail’s existence provides comfort and perspective as Bailey recounts her year of absence due to viral or bacterial infection. From the beginning of Bailey’s patient narrative, the parallels she employs in her snail’s life and hers signal to her readers that this rhetorical choice does more than describe the snail. For example, Bailey writes, “After being transported from the woods, the snail had emerged from its shell into this alien territory of my room…”(Bailey 20). However, she continues by saying, “The snail and I were both living in altered landscapes not of our choosing; I figured we shared a sense of loss and displacement”(Bailey 20). Bailey’s repeated back-and-forth narrative of her snail to herself asks the reader to appreciate her comparisons and how much a snail’s seemingly insignificant existence completely altered her perception of illness. For example, “How wonderful it would be if we humans with illness could simply go dormant while the scientific world went about its snail-paced research, and wake only when new, safe medical treatments were available”(Bailey 109). Through Bailey’s choice of incorporating a braided narrative, central themes in how she copes with the pain of time and absence from society are framed in a whole new light with the research and story of her snail. 

Through exploring the rhetorical technique of a braided narrative employed throughout the patient narratives of Lunden, Norman, Soriano, and Bailey, each offers a multitude of intriguing intersections. While research appears to string the four braided narratives together, they diverge into interesting niches such as the infamous Victorian-era writer Henry James’ sister Alice James and her mysterious illness, well-known actor Gene Wilder’s wife Gilda Radner’s tragic ordeal with ovarian cancer, traditional Philippine folklore, and a scientific dive into a snail’s existence. As Lunden states, “The stories we tell depend on the frameworks that guide our perceptions”(Lunden 284), and each author’s braided narrative does precisely this. The four authors expand and propel our perceptions surrounding patienthood and illness by invoking discussions of systemic gendered inequities, postcolonial reckonings, and much-needed naturalist mindsets. Furthermore, Lunden, Norman, Soriano, and Bailey extend their already powerful patient narratives with these braided narratives in meaningful ways to each individual’s journey and healing. 

Works Cited 

Abby Norman. Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain. New York, Bold Type Books, 2019, pp. 20–23.

Elisabeth Tova Bailey. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. Algonquin Books, 1 Jan. 2010.

Lunden, Jennifer.  American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. HarperCollins, 9 May 2023, pp. 4–284.

Soriano, Jen. Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing. HarperCollins, 22 Aug. 2023, pp. 201–212.