The Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic

March 18, 2013
Among the spate of new works chronicling personal experiences of illness, Gallagher’s poignant reconstruction of her debilitating eye disease and baffling diagnosis over the course of nearly two years underscores the pervasive sense of powerlessness she felt at the hands of the medical system. Gallagher, who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., is the author of several memoirs about her struggle with her Christian faith (Resurrection, et al.). Once a candidate for the Episcopal priesthood, she infuses her journey with a spiritual disorientation, beginning with the sudden discovery at age 60 of a dangerously inflamed optic nerve (a condition called optic neuritis) that could have resulted in blindness. The illness made her feel as if she “dropped out of the world lived in” and was deposited in a kind of Oz, separated from healthy people by a glass wall, where she had instantly become a part of the suffering unfortunates who she had once prayed for and regarded with patronizing sympathy. Forced to scale back her busy life, Gallagher was also terrified that the strain of taking care of her would alienate her husband of 27 years. Doped up on prednisone (steroids) and sent from specialist to specialist, she finally got a referral to the famed Rochester, Minn., Mayo Clinic, where another round of tests and exams only added layers to a mystifying journey. Gallagher does not dole out easy answers in this somber, reflective work. But she finds the humble, bracing imperative to live in the present. “Task: to be where I am.”

June 1, 2013
Memoirist, essayist and novelist Gallagher (The Sacred Meal, 2009, etc.) explores the series of events set into motion by the startling diagnosis that she suffered from a condition causing blindness. Now in her 60s, the author has written extensively about her faith, including her attraction to Episcopal liturgy and, for a time, to the church's priesthood and the fundamental questions about the religion and its administration. Gallagher opens by explaining that her initial interest in Christianity, as an adult, stemmed from a need to fit her life into a "larger story." In the same chapter, the Californian describes how a 2009 routine doctor's visit, which she almost skipped, resulted in the discovery that her right optic nerve was dangerously inflamed and that the condition (called optic neuritis) could destroy her vision. "I dropped out of the world I lived in," she confesses. "It was like falling into Oz." What ensued was a slew of consultations with one specialist after another, during which the author received conflicting advice that included the suggestion to have her eye removed. She was eventually referred to Minnesota's Mayo Clinic. Groggy from prescribed steroids and anxious about the strain that this ordeal placed on her marriage, Gallagher began a deeply introspective journey that led to, among other shifts, a foundational change in her faith and religious outlook. In her book, the author navigates the complex American health care system, the fear and mystery surrounding her search for medical answers and healing, and her renewed appreciation for the necessity of vision: to read, to write and to view the world. A poetic tale of a personal medical crisis.

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June 1, 2013

Spiritual writer Gallagher (Changing Light) recounts a routine trip to the eye doctor that yielded the news that a mysterious illness might take her sight. Billed as a woman's journey through the health-care system, this book wants to be many things: a meditation on faith and spirituality in the face of illness; a diary detailing doctors' visits, tests, insurance forms, and waiting; and a eulogy to a pre-illness life. All of that might have been fine had it not been couched in a poorly used Oz metaphor (Gallagher's name for the land of the sick) that is seldom supported throughout the book. Gallagher might have written a stronger book had she stuck solely to religion or to a comparable story of faith, such as Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. VERDICT There are better texts that pull back the curtain on the health-care system or coming to terms with personal illness. There may be some value to theologians in the intersection of religion and medical culture mentioned in the book.--Stacie Williams, Lexington P.L., KY

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2013
Life-changing moments take place on seemingly ordinary days when we least expect it. That is one of the many lessons writer Gallagher (Practicing Resurrection, 2003) shares in this compelling memoir of the time she spent in what she calls the Land of Oz. Not the fantastical place that sprung from the imagination of L. Frank Baum but rather the place where the sick reside. When her doctor finds something amiss during a routine eye examination, she begins a long journey on a difficult yellow-brick road. Gallagher's memoir is about many things: illness, mortality, faith and doubt, work, busyness, navigating through the crazy quilt that is the American health-care system, and, ultimately, about regaining one's health and one's place in the universe. Most of all, it is the memoir of a writer's life ( Books were to my family's house like beds and stoves, the most basic items, necessary for survival ) and the fear of losing one of the most precious tools of not only of the literary realm but of life itself: the gift of sight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)