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"Edward Albee: A Singular Journey"
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"The Boy on the Green Bicycle"
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[08/23/99]

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For a diabetic child, things were just the same. When sullen, curious little Jeff looked for something in the library that would verify or even partially normalize him to himself, he found nothing but scolding texts about the punitive exchange diet, which reduces all foods to bland interchangeable units, or cheerful but hortatory profiles of a few "successful" diabetics such as tennis champ William Talbot. (Only later did I discover that artist Charles Demuth was not only gay and diabetic but also one of the first users of insulin.) Could I play tennis like Talbot? More likely, it turned out, I could toss my tam in the air and cock my head like that later exemplary diabetic, Mary Tyler Moore.

And so naturally I am pleased that the book market, still happy to embrace the triple crown of memoir, illness and food, has seen the publication of "Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life With Diabetes" by Lisa Roney. It's the first book I have read by another diabetic that's not a how-to manual and that mirrors my experience as a person who takes a body- and mild-altering substance, insulin, two to four times a day. It's the story of another diabetic who finds that words offer some control over the frightening swings of body and mind we are stuck with.

A teacher of writing now in her late 30s, Roney looks back to childhood -- she was diagnosed at age 12 -- in order to answer a question that certainly seems answerable: How does having diabetes, "being diabetic," affect one's life? But lives, though they unfold and give up secrets under many kinds of artful scrutiny, resist cause-and-effect analysis at every turn.

I'm afraid that a simple exercise may show how Roney's discursive and sincere attempt to account for herself via diabetes is doomed, at least on an empirical level. Could she or I (or anyone) predict how our lives would have gone had we never become diabetic? No, of course not. There is no undiabetic duplicate, no control population, in the personal diabetic experiment. Too many springs feed behavior, character and career to allow for a "being diabetic made me this way" life story, no matter how tempting it is to view one's life in those terms.

"Sweet Invisible Body" contains 10 story-of-my-life chapters, mostly chronological but organized more around the growth of self-awareness. Aside from the brave futility of its program, the account has two major flaws. The first is the quality of writing. Throughout, Roney is searching for a then/now voice that will communicate her constant disappointment in physicians, lovers and most friends; her understandable ambivalence about accepting the seriousness of her disease when all that the world sees is an attractive woman who "shouldn't eat sugar"; her Damoclean pleasure in sexuality and flavor; and her real fears: of infection, of neuropathy (the progressive disintegration of nerves, especially in the retinas, hands and feet), of kidney failure, of a life diminished and then cut short.

Her prose, however, is burdened with awkwardness and cliché. One chapter, about Roney the college student's job in a small-town Minnesota cafe, reads as though a writing-class short story sneaked its way in and no editor complained. Metaphors are mixed to a mush or, as in this breathtaking passage (just a portion, too) about a lover of Roney's, followed to the point of no return:

Panos had a gaze like a magnifying glass -- when he turned it on you, you knew you were observed, and your internal organs began first to melt, then to burn. All I wanted, once his eyes had focused on me, was to be grilled to perfection, to be bitten by those white, white teeth, to have those molars release my warm juices into his mouth, and to slide down his throat into the caverns of his body. At the time I never gave a thought to how I would come out on the other end ...

Next page | The strong whiff of "Why me?"