More Than It Hurts You

by: Darin Strauss

Published by: PLUME/Penguin

Reviewed by Jamie Driggers

Life seemed so normal the day everything fell apart.

One sick baby in the ER, that’s all it took to upend the world for perfect strangers. To Josh Goldin, the phone call summoning him to the Pediatric ICU where his son was admitted after he had to be resuscitated, was proof that Josh’s life as a golden boy—the one to whom bad things didn’t happen—was a farce. To Dr. Darlene Stokes, the symptoms of the baby and the anxiety level of the mother just don’t add up. Even a medically minded mother like Dori would surely want to keep her infant in the hospital overnight after he’d coded, wouldn’t she?

More Than It Hurts You is a horrifying glimpse into a microcosm caused and affected by the disease known as “Munchausen by proxy,” one hard to diagnose and even harder to diagnose correctly. How can a doctor prove that a mother is intentionally performing the unthinkable? And without proof, what legs does the law have to stand upon?

Excruciating intimate thoughts and details will make you wish at times you were reading about ponies and rainbows and yet you won’t be able to tear your eyes from the page. The writing is vivid and graphic, with true-to-life dialog that, at times, made me want to beat a character with a blunt object.

I found the combination of detail and limited omniscient (hopping from person to person) point of view difficult to get into, however once I was able to discern the patterns of speech and thought, you couldn’t pry the book from my hands. The subject matter will turn your stomach, but the writing is superb.

Masterfully disturbing, yet satisfying in a deranged sort of way.

NOTE: Darin Strauss is the international bestselling author of the New York Times Notable books Chang and Eng and The Real McCoy. Also a screenwriter, he is adapting Chang and Eng with Gary Oldman, for Disney. The recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing, he is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s creative writing program. ”¨”¨

Author’s Web site: http://www.DarinStrauss.com