PRAISE FOR NERVOUS
(for full blurbs click here)
Soriano, a writer and thinker whose work often focuses on social justice, turns her powerful pen to persistent conditions that dog the body and isolate the individual: chronic pain, depression, anxiety, trauma….Validating and illuminating, this book is a balm to those of who were born “nervous.”
— GLAMOUR
a searing book….Soriano powerfully meditates on both pain and healing.
— TIME
“Nervous”…is a riveting account of how the violence of war and colonization manifest in a descendant’s nervous system.
Fans of San Jose-raised author Stephanie Foo’s memoir “What My Bones Know” will appreciate Filipinx American memoirist Jen Soriano’s debut that dissects transgenerational trauma. Drawing upon science, history and memory, Soriano illuminates the connection between mind and body, telling a story of living with mental illness with stunning, poetic prose.
Candid and original, this collection addresses transgenerational trauma and healing using science, history and memoir. In it, Soriano lyrically reflects on the nervous among us and brings new understanding to the liberatory power of naming, uncovering and healing.
I often wonder how many paths there are when writing about a mental health journey. Sometimes writers lean towards the facts--statistics, historical contexts, and slightly more creative retellings of academic texts. Other times, writers choose the personal: narratives of lives lived, tears cried, hearts broken, illnesses ignored or dismissed. In Nervous, Jen Soriano has found the most intriguing and captivating way to do both, which helps the reader understand how the historical dismissal of women’s pain directly impacts how we are treated today. By showing us how real she is, Soriano forces us to consider the humanity of what pain they hid, who they hid it from, and what their lives could have been if they had been permitted to feel anything. In Nervous, Soriano takes the focus from the abstract and does what doctors (and historians) failed to do: makes her story, her pain, and her life as real as any history that proceeded. Nervous gives face and weight to those forgotten women whose suffering has become little more than anecdotal collections of stories, not real people. It’s seamless and powerful. Nervous is a masterful personal narrative, beautifully written and captivating. It should– and will– be placed alongside some of the best well-crafted and compelling contemporary memoirs of this era.
— Bassey Ikpi, New York Times bestselling author of I’m Telling the Truth but I’m Lying
I couldn't put it down. This book brings light to the dark tunnels of history that live in our bodies. I wish for all mental health, social services, and wellness practitioners to read Nervous.
— Dr. Leny Mendoza Strobel, author of Coming Full Circle and editor of Babaylan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous
The essays in NERVOUS crackle and pulse with a beautiful bodily wisdom that animates a sparkling intellect. Jen Soriano tenderly, unflinchingly excavates layers of history and pain—found both in her body and our body politic—and offers all of us tools and materials to build a path toward wholeness. I’m in awe of Jen Soriano and you will be too.
—Angela Garbes, author of Essential Labor and Like a Mother
Nervous is the epitome of innovation. In this painfully glorious essay collection, Jen Soriano illuminates the ways Filipinos have been mistreated and oppressed by a multitude of systems, both in colonial times and in the present. That is the best of what a collection can do: giving voice to the silent corners we’ve been forced into. Nervous accomplishes that and much more—a true literary achievement.
— Evette Dionne, award-winning author of Lifting As We Climb and Weightless
This book is such a gift. Luminous and tender, Nervous is not your conventional trauma narrative. Part medical history, part lyrical memoir, Jen Soriano traces the rivers and tributaries of her pain, becoming fluent in the language of her body. Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing is a revelation for every person who has been silenced, neglected, and made to feel unworthy of care.
— Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project and author of Year of the Tiger
As I neared the end of this viscerally moving book, I thought of my students hungrily absorbing the stories in Nervous along with the stories in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings. That is to say, Nervous has instantly joined the crucial works of Asian American literature and the newly teeming space of American literature as a whole. A brilliant reckoning, Nervous begins in Soriano’s individual story but enlarges to include the necessary stories of family, community, and homelands. “When we are met with erasure, we story back with permanence,” Soriano says. Though it is steeped in pain, Nervous is nevertheless a testament of exultant embodiment—of woundedness and remedy, of memory and history, of disruption and coalition, of diaspora and belonging.
— Rick Barot, author of The Galleons and Chord
How does history live in our bodies? Activist and lyric storyteller Jen Soriano’s corporeal and subversive memoir-in-essays breaks through the barrier between the body and the story of what’s been done to bodies in the name of land, money, and power. In narratives both intimate and investigatory—exploring colonialism, racism, gender, trauma, disability, and motherhood— Soriano’s galvanizing words cut through to the nerve. Nervous is an enthralling and expansive page-turner.
— Barrie Jean Borich, author of My Lesbian Husband, Body Geographic, and Apocalypse, Darling
An unflinching examination of the cost of “war on repeat” and the nature of pain. Soriano challenges the myth that the world is comprised of disconnected and easily interchangeable parts, and in so doing, not only sheds light on how our violence to each other and uprootedness affects our inner wiring, but also on our complicity in doing the same to the lands we inhabit. As fearless a read as it is full of warmth and empathy, “Nervous” ultimately soothed this reader and sufferer of chronic and ancestral pain, to an all-too-rare state of multidimensional gratitude.
—Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of American Harvest and Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye
Nervous travels through country and family, time and body, to reveal the knowledge required to practice healing—especially when race and gender complicate both speaking and silence. In Nervous, Jen Soriano brilliantly documents the costs and rewards of risk, trust and its absence, and ultimately, the fortitude of character and heart it takes to keep insisting on care.
— Khadijah Queen, author of ANODYNE and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On
Nervous provides a necessary mirror for so many–including Asian Americans and children of immigrants–who remain hungry for reflections and who are insistent on truth-telling. Indeed, many of us may gain answers to our own burning questions from this important work. I am grateful for this example of how we can be in community around accumulated trauma and how we can, and must, dedicate ourselves to replacing 'patterns of neglect with experiences of tenderness and connection.'"
— Sunu P. Chandy, author of My Dear Comrades