Review by Kate Lewis
With Body, Nina B. Lichtenstein Explores the Physical Contours of Self
Navigating through explorations of a body allow author Nina B. Lichtenstein’s memoir, Body: My Life In Parts, to bring together the entirety of her life as she lived it: viscerally, with teeth, and belly, and breasts, and back – as well as how the breakdown of those parts can often bring us to our literal knees.
The book traces her life and uncovers the deeper meaning that some of these parts of her brought to the whole. An incident with a bit of food stuck in her teeth signals the death knell of her marriage. The unexpected last time she breastfed her last son shapes her experiences as a mother of three sons. Of her middle son, weaned earlier than perhaps he might have liked due to the arrival of his younger brother, Lichtenstein writes,
Maybe I’m trying to make up for how crazy those early years were, how little time and energy I had for him then, and it could be I’ll always be (subconsciously) compensating for his emotional needs I was unable to meet at the intense time of my breastfeeding years (30).
Our stories, after all, live in our selves. Or, as Lichtenstein writes, “Our bodies, our skin, our storybooks: wars and victories, sorrows and joys, all inscribed there and connecting us to our memories, to our stories, and to ourselves (78).”
Arranged into chapters by body part, this inventive structure allows Lichtenstein to pull from across the expansive decades of her life to draw together a narrative around a theme. The vignettes included in ‘Hands’ trace the time she punched a man in the face as a young woman out at a nightclub, as well as the time she sliced open a finger – down to the bone – as a busy mother of three young sons. In ‘Vagina,’ the intricacies of her conversion to Judaism on the occasion of her marriage are laid bare, as she adheres to the religious rituals of taharat-ha-mishpacha, which include the abstaining from intimacy during menstruation, as well as mikvah, the ritual bath ceremony, and the deep meaning and connection she finds in both.
Beyond the meaning drawn from shared parts such as teeth, knees, or hips, Lichtenstein also delves into a deep understanding of what it means to move through the world in a particular body, in her instance, as a tall, blonde Scandinavian, often chafing at the limitations of sameness in her native Norway, sometimes drawn to situations where she might instead stand out.
I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Lichtenstein for several years, first as part of an online writing group devoted to flash nonfiction, then as founding co-editors of the literary magazine In a Flash, and her book is very like her as a person: effusive, warm, welcoming, and deeply embodied. Her works thrum and pulse with life, she grounds emotion in the sensations of soles of feet and the warm press of palms, and so I read her book eagerly. As a writer with the opposite inclination – my own work is often musings and mental images, experienced through thought first and foremost – I learn so much every time I encounter Lichtenstein’s writing. How to live fully present, feeling everything, storing it at a cellular level for later.
A series of prompts at the end of the work invites the reader to recall their own connections and memories through the lens of body. How do our physical forms guide us through the world? What do they make possible, and how might they limit us? What gratitude do we owe our corporeal selves, and how might we best care for these spaces we take along for the whole of our lives?
Unafraid to face the realities of our complicated bodies and how they make for complex lives, Body is a work of understanding, as Lichtenstein writes in a poem of her son’s birth, “some of life’s messiest things / bring the biggest miracles (154).”
Body: My Life In Parts by Nina B. Lichtenstein
Vine Leaves Press, 2025, 254 pages, $17.99 paperback
ISBN: 9783988321510
Kate Lewis’ writing has been nominated for Best of the Net and appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many more, and she also writes The Village on Substack. She lives in Virginia with her husband, their two young children, and a mischief-making dog. Find her online @katehasthoughts.