Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life with Diabetes

by Lisa Roney

Now in paperback, this vivid and often beautifully written account of the realities of diabetes (Chicago Tribune) is essential reading for diabetics and their friends and families. Lisa Roney was diagnosed with diabetes just before her twelfth birthday. This is her candid and exquisitely written account of how the disease directly affects the choices she makes every day, in every aspect of her life, from food and exercise to career and family. What sets this apart from other testimonies about living with an illness is Roney's remarkable willingness to reveal the usually hidden emotional consequences of her erosion of her self-esteem, feelings of vulnerability, the influence on her sexual choices, and heightened awareness of mortality. Full of wisdom, humor, and practical advice, Sweet Invisible Body will be welcomed by diabetics and their friends and families who have never before had a spokesperson as articulate, honest, and insightful as Lisa Roney.

Genres: Memoir, Disability, Nonfiction, Medical, Medicine

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

In SIB, Lisa Roney describes what it meant to have type 1 diabetes at a certain time with a certain type of personality. (I say "meant" because I wonder how her experience of living with diabetes has changed since she published the book; in the interim, the options and technology for managing it have changed quite a bit, becoming both more and less burdensome, and more and less obvious to others.) The quotation that sums up the entire book is, "Perhaps my illness only gives me a retrospective excuse for a personality I would have had no matter what. The thing is that I will never know....My family and friends and doctors and I called it everything else: stubbornness, anti-authoritarianism, feminism, sexual freedom, love troubles, political outrage, intellectual independence, man-hating, experimentation, selfishness, workaholism, perfectionism, when, really, I was trying to find a socially acceptable way not to fit in, perhaps some marginal niche where I would belong" (p. 230). The book describes all of these rebellions in detail, sometimes painfully so--the sections about her love life were sometimes difficult to read. As she points out, not everyone with diabetes is affected by it psychologically to this extent, then or now. But there's no doubt that she has been.

Other insights include, "Diabetics are given an eating disorder as part of a prescription for survival" (p. 122); "neurosis is a complication, too" (p. 138); "The state of the weather seems comparable to my blood sugar levels--some days it makes exercise outdoors impossible, but most of the time it is just something to take into consideration" (p. 149). She's very readable, even if she does sometimes try too hard, like in the place where she counts everything in her house.
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Read as part of the Diabetes Memoir Project, in which I am reading my way through 8 commercially published (i.e., not self-published) biographies/memoirs of people with type 1 diabetes (i.e., not parents of children with type 1 diabetes) treated with injections/insulin pump (i.e., not a transplant), in chronological order by the person’s date of diagnosis. The titles are:
- Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg (Elizabeth was diagnosed in 1918 at age 11)
- Borrowing Time: Growing Up with Juvenile Diabetes by Pat Covelli (diagnosed in 1964 at age 10)
- Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes by Mary Tyler Moore (diagnosed in 1969 at age 33)
- Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life with Diabetes by Lisa Roney (diagnosed in 1972 at age 11)
- Needles: A Memoir of Growing Up with Diabetes by Andie Dominick (diagnosed in 1980 at age 9)
- Not Dead Yet: My Race Against Disease: From Diagnosis to Dominance by Phil Southerland (diagnosed in 1982 at age 7 months)
- The Sugarless Plum: A Ballerina’s Triumph Over Diabetes by Zippora Karz (diagnosed in 1987 at age 21)
- The Insulin Express: One Backpack, Five Continents, and the Diabetes Diagnosis that Changed Everything by Oren Liebermann (diagnosed in 2014 at age 31)

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book made me angry. I wanted to read it and see if someone could put into words what it is really like living with the disease. How it feels to wake with a low and not know where you are or what you are doing. Seems she also didn’t know how to do this. Rather she blames everything on this disease and how it has kept her back from living her life to the fullest.

There were parts of this book that made me sad, made me angry and just made me wonder why I was reading this book. I held out hope that it would get better. That she would accept her life may be different than she envisioned it and maybe working out would be determined by her sugar levels and not social commitments.

I’ve lived with Type 1 for over 35 years and was taught to not let it hold me back and never use it as an excuse. I hope Lisa learns this. I hope she has come to grips with this disease and learned to love and be loved.

[Karla Kitalong]

I learned a lot about Type I diabetes, and about Lisa's life before I met her. Thanks, Lisa, for sharing so many details.

[Aimee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lisa Roney presents us with a memoir that not only breaks down diabetes from a medical perspective, but also gives a deeply personal view of the disease. "Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life with Diabetes", is beautiful in it's honesty. It progresses through Lisa's life, starting with the discovery of the disease at 11 years old, and on through college and into her professional life; Lisa uses diabetes and her struggles with it to frame her journey.

Lisa is able to describe her disease in detail, using the doctors definition, and then going deeper to give the reader a poignant view of what that prognosis means to her. In doing this she gives herself great credibility, and allows her readers-specifically those with diabetes-to find common ground. I, myself, don't have diabetes; but in growing up with a Grandfather that did, I was able to understand his life more fully.

While Lisa spares nothing in describing her struggles with diabetes, she does so without evoking sympathy. She’s able to achieve this by being so raw, so open, with all aspects of her life. She encapsulates the struggles of childhood diabetes: shoots, weight gain, diet restrictions; and then on into her adult life. She encapsulates her struggles in her childhood through her loss of the sweets that so define southern cuisine: “At ten, chess pie was my triumph. At twelve, a now impossible past. My mother taught me to make whole wheat bread instead.”. While this line doesn’t ask the reader to mourn for her, or to feel sorry that she was 12 and had a restrictive diet, it beautifully illustrates the loss she experiences; I mean, what twelve year old wants to eat whole wheat bread?

Lisa’s descriptions move from medical and complicated, to flowing and lovely. She writes something that is poetic. She works past base observations and looks deep within herself to pull meaning from her experiences. When contemplating her relationship with food in the section “Hunger and Plenty”, Lisa describes her longing for sweets, “Suddenly, before my eyes, Picasso’s creamy whites turned into vanilla, his glossy browns into chocolate and cinnamon, the bright purples and reds of the thirties paintings into fruit flavors.”. Her cravings turn into an obsession at times, and she struggles with her love hate (okay, mostly hate) relationship with food. I was able to find something deeply human in her desires and necessary deprivations. She is faced with something that moves from the normal female food obsessions, and becomes a medical malady. It is both heartbreaking and triumphant; Lisa is able to handle her disease with such a skillful eye, and such a poetic hand that anyone that has ever struggled with any aspect of their life is able to find common ground.

From a writers perspective, it is easy to see that Lisa is successful in her novel because she approaches her disease with a contemplative eye. She weaves poetry in and out of her medical diagnosis and allows herself to be objective in her view of who she is, and who diabetes forces her to become. Though the novel encompasses her life, she stays true to her theme; that diabetes, no matter how hard she tries to fight it, is a part of her. And, while it is a part of her, Lisa makes it clear that the disease does not define her. She presents the reader with a characterization of herself that is strong, and yet not afraid to be weak, not afraid to break down, and not faultless. She is three dimensional and accessible; a person that has triumphed.

Roney, Lisa. Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life with Diabetes. Henry Holt and Company-New York, 1999. Print.

[Dnicebear · Rating 5 out of 5]

People who helped make this book happen include the physician of the author, who read for accuracy as well as to learn (sign of a great physician). What a gift to have an author include details about her body, details we are accustomed to overlook and ignore. Page 33 tells the story clearly: "When you have a disease that no one can see, you are alone with it in a peculiar way: the more obviously ill and handicapped may be rejected out of hand, but with diabetes you are accepted, to the extent that you can 'pass.' And, I might emphasize, only so far as you seem 'normal.' What this creates is a division of self, the 'abnormal' hidden within the 'normal,' the body primed to betray its secrets, the rejections delayed but looming. ...I am always a guest in the good graces of others, and, directly or indirectly, it is my body that will turn them away from me." I feel like the author's experience is true for way too many conditions of bodies, for example, one who deals with schizophrenia. No one wants to see the truth, and the one with 'the condition' is not about to make them.

[Leif Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't like the writer that much. Often came across as narcissistic and self-pitying. And for something writing a memoir, she seems to have very little emotional insight, particularly in regards to her relationships with men. If the "nice guy" from IT is throwing up after every date with you, then you might not be as innocent a victim as you portray yourself.

However Roney does write very well about the diabetic condition and the physical travails associated with a chronic disease. I could recommend it if she hadn't implied that diabetes makes you prone to dating assholes. I'm pretty sure that's not how it works.

[Lora · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two and a half stars. I really enjoyed this author's voice and appreciated her overall positive tone. I think she does a good job of being emotionally honest and medically accurate. I must say she hooked me at the beginning with her description of what hypoglycemia feels like when you've lost its warning symptoms, which is something else I have in common with her. At times her writing seemed a little too self-conscious and precious for my liking, though, and by the end I'd lost some of my patience with it. Great title.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone, who has a close friend with diabetes particularly juvenile diabetes. The author does an excellent job explaining her difficulties controling her disease and its impact on her life, which is something most of us do not understand.

[Leendert · Rating 4 out of 5]

opened my eyes to what it means to live with diabetes

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1972 at age 11, Lisa Roney recounts how this disease and changed and shaped her life.