Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain

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Review ------ Selected as one of the top ten titles in Lifestyle for Spring 2018.―Publishers Weekly "Required reading for anyone who is a woman, or has ever met a woman. This means you."―Jenny Lawson, author of Let's Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy "This book deals with such an important subject. Abby Norman's odyssey with her own is sadly an all too common story to those of us who suffered in silence for so long. My hope is that anyone involved in women's will read her story and revisit the way we treat women and their concerns in our culture."―Padma Lakshmi, New York Times best-selling author and co-founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America "A fresh, honest, and startling look at what it means to exist in a woman's body, in all of its beauty and pain. Abby's voice is inviting, unifying, and remarkably brave." ―Gillian Anderson, Actress, activist and co-author of We: A Manifesto For Women Everywhere "[Norman] builds a convincing case that women describing discomfort are more likely than men to be dismissed by physicians, but along the way tells a story that will resonate with anyone (man or woman) who has ever experienced pain.... [She] is a terrific storyteller with a gift for weaving memorable anecdotes, some drawn from medical history, others from recent scientific debates and most plucked from her own travails... Norman's life is much more than a disease.... [An] important addition to a long tradition of pain memoirs. Norman shares a particular tale of suffering but expresses a common frustration about the dearth of words to convey pain. Any schoolgirl can talk about love, Virginia Woolf famously said, but 'let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.'"―New York Times Book Review "Compelling and impressively, Norman's narrative not only offers an unsparing look at the historically and culturally fraught relationship between women and their doctors, it also reveals how, in the quest for answers and good , women must still fight a patriarchal medical establishment to be heard. Disturbing but important reading."―Kirkus Reviews "From wandering wombs to ovary compressors, Abby Norman's book is packed with fascinating historical detail about how women's bodies have been misunderstood and mistreated by male doctors for centuries. It is also an important reminder that there is still a culture of silence surrounding women's gynecological in the twenty-first century, and that there is work yet to be done when it comes to advocating for women's care."―Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Butchering Art "With searing prose, science writer and editor Norman pens a heartfelt medical history and memoir of coming to terms with the limitations of one's physical body....A thoughtful read."―Library Journal "Abby Norman writes powerfully about her experience living with endometriosis and presents research on the disease and the history of women who were brushed off by medical professionals. You know, like how hysteria is anything that ails a woman, but the same symptoms do not equate hysteria in a man. It's hitting all my feminist and history and medicine buttons."―Book Riot "Author and activist Abby Norman, has put decades of labor-including careful, independent medical study-into studying this phenomenon, as she describes in her book Ask Me About My Uterus, both a memoir and a trenchant manifesto."―The New Republic Read more ( javascript:void(0) ) About the Author ---------------- Abby Norman is a science writer and hosts a daily podcast on Anchor.fm. Her work has been featured in the Rumpus, Independent, Paste Magazine, Medium, Atlas Obscura, Seventeen, Quartz, Cosmopolitan, and Lady Science/The New Inquiry. As a patient advocate and speaker, she has been on conference faculty at the Endometriosis Foundation of America, Stanford University's Medicine X conference, and received literacy training through the Dartmouth Institute. She lives on the coast of Maine with her dog, Whimsy. Read more ( javascript:void(0) )