Jen Soriano

By now, well over 100 years after Freud, we are used to thinking about illness as a story not yet fully told, and its treatment as the act of uncovering and retelling the story.  But those 100 years have greatly expanded and transformed every understanding of what stories we need to excavate: whose lives, which events, what violences have traumatized, leading not just to painful legacies but legacies of bodily pain.  In “Nervous,” Jen Soriano takes us into the history of her own painful, dormantly powerful nervous system and shows us how its story rhymes with myths of white suprematicism and the exuberant, persistent resistance to it.  Soriano weaves a lattice of biography and history, from histories of generational violence and to tales of the polluting and cleaning up of the Pasig river and its many esteros.  And she shows how communities of the living and of the already lived, all those still present in stories and bodies, both animate our ailments and point the way forward to health.  The cliché “holistic” doesn’t do this book justice; it shows us that our bodies and their stories don’t end at the skin or the air around us or even at either end of our lives but are part of an ongoing epic.

--Dave Karp, 4/10/23

You can count on Jen Soriano to cut effortlessly between memory and history, between the everyday and the momentous, and to discover the complex moral threads that ties all the scenes of her cinematic essays together. The piece I read before writing this introduction, “Blow,” does it again, moving from a child on broken pavement to the cocaine trade in the Mission to the atomic bomb to dandelions in a way that would be breathtaking if it didn’t seem just so obvious and right.  Soriano’s essays may not always give us easy answers—her pieces aren’t self- improvement bromides for 10-step ethical living.  But they take us through a kind of moral kinesthetics that makes us think and think again.  We feel we’ve been places, done things and seen what is and isn’t, emerging with a sharpness of mind to match the writing.

--Dave Karp (11/18/2023)

"I write to get closer to emotional truths that gnaw at me" Jen confesses in an online interview, and it's those truths that gnaw at us as her lushly lyric essays wind in and through time to tie together emotional truths that are often complicated, and sometimes ugly, but also often beautiful and deep. In these fragmented essays that explore the often ignored and dismissed pain experienced by those who don't fit so easily into diagnosed boxes, Jen takes a deep look at "our own roles in perpetuating or breaking old cycles, the long perpetuated "histories of silencing and erasure" that only the lucky survive "of wilted others/Resourced to navigate the labyrinth of disease". And lucky for us, Jen navigates that space free of cynicism and full of honesty and a love of multiplicity, so that we might be able to see beyond the simple, monolithic answers and solutions to a future that allows us all to find a little more life and freedom from the pain.

--Matt Trease (05/20/2021)