Kathy O'Shea published an anthology of migraine stories and essays by prominent writers to increase understanding of this headache disorder.
In college, I fell in love with novels by Virginia Woolf. My appreciation for her deepened when I learned we had migraine in common.
I had my first episode when I was 14 and camping with my family along the St. Lawrence River. My older brother and I were watching a Charlie Chaplin movie at the campground recreational center when sudden excruciating pain streaked across my head and would not go away. I was helped back to our family camp, where I started vomiting. My parents and I had no idea what was happening.
I saw my primary care doctor, a neurologist, and a chiropractor, but little was understood about migraine in the late 1970s, especially in rural upstate New York where I grew up.
The attacks increased throughout high school and college, but no specific migraine treatments were available. Despite monthly episodes, I completed my undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and began teaching at Monroe Community College in Rochester. It wasn't until I was 37 that I was officially diagnosed. Despite numerous efforts, I was unable to break the cycle of chronic migraine headaches.
In 2016, I experienced a particularly stubborn attack that lasted three months. Distraught, I looked for something in literature that might console me. I found an essay by Joan Didion called “In Bed,” in which she describes her experience with migraine. I had read it in graduate school and remember sobbing because it was the first time someone accurately captured what it's like to have a migraine.
Rereading it inspired me to find other authors who had written about headaches and migraine. I returned to Woolf, who wrote about her experience with migraine in “On Being Ill.”
Searching for other authors, I found essays, poetry, fiction, and a play by such writers as Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Anna Leahy, Oliver Sacks, and Hilary Mantel. A poem by Austen is one of my favorites:
When stretch'd on one's bed
With a fierce-throbbing head
Which precludes alike thought or repose
How little one cares
For the grandest affairs
That may busy the world as it goes!
In discussing these writings with my husband, who also is an English professor, I realized I could organize them into a collection. The anthology, So Much More Than a Headache: Understanding Migraine Through Literature, was published in 2020.
I hope it provides comfort as readers learn how these authors experienced migraine and how they chose to write about it. —As told to Paul Wynn
