Before the guests began making their way to the library room of the Century Club for her book party last week, Hunter College English professor Lynne Greenberg (left) recalled the circumstances of her memoir’s beginnings: She had just been released from a clinic in Michigan, coming off an addiction to the methadone doctors had prescribed to treat the chronic pain stemming from a decades-old neck injury that had never healed properly, when her sister invited her out to lunch with a group of friends that included Random House executive editor Susan Mercandetti. After hearing Greenberg talk about what she had been through since the injury had flared up, “I suggested writing as a way for Lynne to exorcise her pain,” Mercandetti told us. “I was so surprised when she dropped this beautifully written manuscript on my desk.” All the more so because Greenberg had completed that first draft of The Body Broken in just seven weeks—the start of “a new era,” she said, that has led her even further from her background in academic writing on 17th-century British literature to begin writing a novel.
Now, Greenberg continued, she had good days and bad days, but she was still staying active, citing the positive power of endorphins—she was getting ready for a family surfing expedition to Cabo just after Thanksgiving, and she takes ballet classes almost every day. Still, as she fielded questions about various pain medications from friends, she was frank about how the pain’s resurgence had radically altered her life. “My short term memory is shot,” she confided, “but I can still go into a graduate seminar and riff on Milton for an hour straight. It’s like it’s all muscle memory.”