Please Read This Leaflet Carefully
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Please Read This Leaflet Carefully , the debut novel from Norwegian writer and translator Karen Havelin, is the story of a woman whose body has become her enemy. We meet Laura Fjellstad first as she works and cares for her young daughter, while struggling with debilitating pain and endometriosis, an invisible chronic illness. As the novel tracks backward, the reader meets Laura's younger and somewhat healthier selves (a hopeful bride in New York, a baby queer in Paris, a figure skater in Norway), and uncovers her tireless work to gain control of her identity, her illness and the conflicting demands made by doctors, friends, lovers and family. Havelin's debut novel etches details of daily life into a gripping and darkly humorous bildungsroman about the intricacies of love and life in a fragile body. Man Booker Prize-winning author Paul Beatty says, Most books about disease try to describe the pain; told in poetic whisper, Karen Havelin's debut novel lets pain speak for itself. It's a book that dares you be nosy, to eavesdrop and listen in to a stoic young woman whom no one noticed until she began to disappear, her body disintegrating from the inside out until there's nothing left but searing agony and almost impossibly—a burning triumph. Jarringly funny and perceptive; an intimate reckoning with the inner demons and precarity of everyday life, unpacked through the very specific lens of a woman with chronic pain.
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PLEASE READ THISLEAFLET CAREFULLY
KEEP THIS LEAFLET.
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Ella and I needed each other and we were okay. Her small, warm body against mine. Her little face, covered in tears so quickly from the first wail. I know every single sound that leads up to crying when I hear her fall and bump her head on the table. I scoop her up to intercept the tears. Her legs clamping around me and her fists that clutch my shirt. I hold her on my hip, lean against the kitchen counter and talk to her in a low voice. She was born, she filled out, she lengthened, learned things, was deposited down on her feet, started to speak. She can’t be left alone even for the duration of a shower or a bathroom visit. She can’t open a door. She can’t make a phone call. It’s such a relief to have some time to myself when she’s with Nick, but I think about her all the time anyway, like I’m lovesick. Her little mop of fluffed up silky, white hair on the top back of her beloved head. Her sticky little fingers that grab, her hot biscuit breath when she cries into my face. Her tiny, perfect teeth with a miniscule space between the two front ones.
As a child, I was always in the hospital—asthmatic, allergic to more and more things, wheezing, coughing, itching, always a bellyache for some reason or another. My tests results were always borderlining something dangerous that required more extensive testing to rule out. Somehow, though, Ella is amazingly—so far, knock on wood—in perfect health. I tell myself no one knows anything but today anyway, and even if everything were to go wrong, pediatric medicine has evolved a lot since the early ’80s in Norway. My therapist once told me that it is common for pediatricians to fall out with parents, because they prioritize bonding with the children. That’s not how it was with Dr. Simonsen. Certain things were done to me as a very young child that adults wouldn’t be put through without general anesthesia these days. A needle of sedatives in my pale thigh while I sat in my mother’s lap; an enormous machine that hung from the ceiling and Dr. Simonsen with the huge, black eyebrows standing by the bench, his white doctor’s coat with the buttons right by my face in a darkened room. I tried to tell them to stop because I was retching, but soon discovered that my protests had no effect. Hands emerged to hold me down on the hard bench. Years of cooperation only to find that there never was any choice.
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