Books throw us into the world as much as they provide respite from it. Now that summer is here, I am reminded of the particular pleasure of lying reading on the grass. It’s a memory of adolescence, filled with sensuality: toes curled on to green softness; the sun, pulsing hot on bare legs; the book – Jane Eyre, or The God of Small Things perhaps – held aloft to keep glare off the face. But it also has an ethical charge. I was reading, as so many young women have read, to find out how to be a strong woman in an oppressive world, how to channel anger and let it take me outwards, away from the pettiness of family squabbles; how to allow the body’s needs and wants to play out without shame.
There are dozens of reasons, many good, not to go for a ride in a hot air balloon. These might range from contingent factors like poor weather or lack of access, to more essential but also essentially subjective factors such as the fear of heights or plain lack of interest. None of these objections are wrong, and neither is the moderate view that it might, after all, be nice, but not nicer than anything else that’s nice, so that in the end you wouldn’t do it. But down on the ground are also some of what might be called accidental non-balloonists, who want to fly, who wouldn’t balk at the rental, but who despite that, even in fine weather, regard it all as too much trouble. Perhaps they’re perfectionists, distractible, or weak-willed, feeling undeserving—there’s no need for fine taxonomies here, except to say that it is to this latter group that I belong, the group of flightless birds with wings that work. In theory, I want to, I can, I even ought to, but up to now, I haven’t.
I could begin by making a list of all the things I’ve lost: a green blouse with a lizard brooch, during a train ride. A fancy, travel-size tube of mint-flavored toothpaste, after an intercontinental flight. A boyfriend, in 1982. A sock. An aspirin tablet. Contact lenses. My house keys—but they were inside a tote bag, something I only discovered after changing all the locks.
DeForest, a practicing neurologist and palliative care physician, at times seems to waver between the goals of imaginative fiction and bearing witness. “A History of Present Illness” offers us the perspective of a doctor who feels everything. Her writing is dreamlike and fragmentary, a sequence of vivid scenes that the reader must piece together, like a puzzle, to understand who exactly is telling us this story. The answer, tucked in the book’s last pages, is a revelation.