The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir

“This memoir, like all of Sophie’s work, defies capture. Reading her is like stepping out of time and into something visceral and haunting and reclaiming. Her prose is a balm that calls me back to myself time and time again into a deeper type of knowing and remembering; this is the kind of book that will make you talk to trees and pray to moths, which to me is an urgent and necessary act.”

"Full of arresting, luminous, and generative insight. Like a forest spirit gifted with a lyrical pen, Strand shows us the extraordinary connections among bodies, energies, metaphors, and ecologies. Her work brims with wisdom about health and illness, meaning and mystery. A must-read."

"Sophie Strand is a poetic thinker, dreamer, and visionary whose words bridge the false divides between the ecological, the political, and the spiritual to present us with a re-membering of the collective body that connects all life. In The Body Is A Doorway, Strand inhabits the lyric memoir with seemingly effortless grace, weaving seamlessly from the story of her personal journey through illness, love, and life amidst social and environmental collapse a meditative reflections on humanity's relationship with itself and the rest of the world. Bound together by Strand's delicate prose and shimmering intellect, these threads come together to form a tapestry that offers the reader a map for navigating our world's increasingly uncertain future. Throughout the book, Strand fearlessly plumbs the depth of human society's shadow sides but never gives in to despair, drawing from her characteristic affinity for mythology and archetypal imagination to generate meaning, beauty, and hope. Readers will leave this book with a deeper connection to the numinosity of life, death, and everything in between." 

“Against the stentorian city sounds screaming the latest new spells to guarantee "healing" and "wellbeing" to the zealous pilgrim, a whispery song wafts gently across the streets, past the doorways and signs marked by unpronounceable therapies, and through the crevices of our exhausted bodies. Sophie Strand's more-than-human song, her brilliance, her earthbound theology of the body in its gloriously awkward dehiscence, traces out a turn in the fabric of things: a moment when we seem to be recognizing that we are of this earth and we must move and crawl and fall and die and live again at its own pace. Read this book, written lovingly in the lowercase, and you might find yourself scandalized by the spirit of Sophie's sermon: that your body is and always was a doorway, not the house."

"The Body is a Doorway touched my heart, nurtured my soul and enchanted my spirit in a way no other book has. Sophie Strand's vulnerable and powerful memoir is a potent reminder that healing is a process of becoming, not an end goal. We are not linear beings; we are ever expansive and interconnected. This rare gem is a must read for anyone on a journey of self-actualization and self-love."

“The Body is a Doorway is an epic poem of survival -- an act of devotion to life itself. While chronic illness lures some victims to abandon their bodies, for Sophie it has been a tether: a calling more deeply into relationship with her body and the living world. Each new mysterious symptom, every medical gatekeeper, even the pathological judgements of the wellness Industry are turned into compost by this eloquent writer. From it sprouts the healing metaphors of nature’s belonging. This book will feel like a bosom friend to anyone who lives in the lonely land of the sick.”

"When she finds herself grappling with the confounding terrors of chronic illness, one of the most visionary novelists of her generation starts to apprentice herself to the living land, drawing insight and guidance from the other animals, plants, fungal webs, landforms, and inscrutable weather patterns. Using her writing to weave her way, spider-wise, into the polymorphic web of what is, Sophie Strand slowly comes to sense herself as an exuberant expression of the breathing earth, and her body—even in its glitching confusion—as finest medicine."
 

"Be ready. Here is a graced and feral prophecy, one that breaches our comforting sense of separate skins. With her winged prose, Sophie Strand unweaves outworn binaries of sickness and health, healing and decline, even aliveness and death. Mothwings, woodchuck nibbles, starlight, the fungus beneath our calloused feet—all of these gather to sing a wild new sacrament, baptizing readers in the unruly and beautiful earthen ecologies that make us truly whole."

"In this prophetic, gorgeously written memoir, Strand tells one young woman’s story of confronting mysterious, life-threatening illness, and her efforts to transcend the toxic positivity of the current healing establishment, in which curing equals success. She brings shamanic intensity to her narrative and in a voice that is entirely her own, bridging mythology, medicine, ecology, neuroscience, literature and cultural commentary in a thoroughly original book that deserves a place on your shelf next to Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. Strand is a literary alchemist, a transformer of pain into beauty, capable of revealing profound, brilliant links between the personal and the planetary in language that tears your heart out. The Body is a Doorway brims with passionate complexity. I could not put it down."

"In language as alive as the wind, as sparkling as the river, as wise as the owl, as connected as the funghi and as illuminating as the mountain, The Body Is a Doorway invites us to reimagine ourselves, our bodies, and our humanness beyond the limited narratives we've been given, clearing a path to deeper presence and aliveness. Through expansive, ecological storytelling, Sophie Strand reminds us what becomes possible when we cease the endless quest for wellness and return to the wisdom, wonder, and wildness of our bodies."

"Sophie Strand is a magnificent weaver of words and worlds. In 'The Body is a Doorway,' she invites us through the portal of her lived experience, and re-earths us of all that we have forgotten. This is no small thing in this distracted world. When I read her, I remember what it is to be truly here. And I feel welcome inside of all of it. This book is yet another revelatory work from this remarkable soul."

"This book is a doorway of no return back into the entangled and enchanted, the pheremonal and phenomenal, the cellular and cosmic, the rhizomatic and territorial. Strand deconstructs and re-writes neoliberal notions of health and wellbeing through deep personal, multi-sensory inquiry and physical hardship. She is a somatic and literary cartographer to deeper bodily truths. Those whom society deems "unwell" may be the sentinel species of our times, reminding us of our ignored but unbroken umbilical cord to the broader ecology. The living world is reflecting back to us who we are, and our survival will depend on heeding the omens of our bodies, our embedded communities and our nesting environments. The human, like the body itself, is not singular. It never has been. It's a cacophony of pluralities, a multiverse of beings negotiating the quicksand of capitalist modernity. No body will be unscathed in the cartographical shuffle of history making. Let this book be a portend and a guide." 
 

"Sophie Strand once again wrote something that will make you feel enchanted and whole no matter your circumstances. The Body Is A Doorway will break your heart and help you put it back together, feeling powerful and connected in even the worst of times. A must read for those of us who are sick, as well as anyone who loves us or might become sick one day."