Top 10 books about the body

In some ways, everybook is about the body. No one lives apart from theirs, and so no writer, speaker or character exists fully removed from the simultaneously fragile and indispensable fact of a corporeal existence. Stories are lived in bodies and made in them; language itself is created in breathing and muscle, in gesture, contraction, release. I could list hundreds of books that draw on rich traditions of writing about illness; disability; gender; race; desire, politics; parenthood; daughterhood; living; and dying, all of them anchored in our bodies.

But instead, here are 10, across genres, and styles, and periods, that influenced the writing of my book Places I’ve Taken My Bodyand the living that led to it. Every list inevitably leaves something out, but I trust that these 10 books will lead you to a thousand more.

1. Frankenstein byMary

ShelleyWhen

Victor Frankenstein’s mother dies, he goes to university occupied with the “deepest mysteries of creation”, intent on learning how to make a living being, so that he might combat loss, death and decay. He sutures a man from salvaged parts, then animates the body he’s made. But the Creature, wonderful in theory, horrifies him once it is alive. The devastation that this wreaks for both creator and his Creature is without end. This is a dark and indispensable book about bothbuilding and having a body.

2. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scar