Tender Points
Tender Points is a narrative fractured by trauma. Named after the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, the book-length lyric essay explores chronic pain, sexual violence, and medical sexism through lived experience and pop culture.
Originally published in 2015 by Timeless, Infinite Light, Tender Points is now available from Nightboat Books. The Nightboat edition includes an afterword about how writing and reading from the book changed my life. Interested in teaching Tender Points? Check out the teaching guide we made. If you’re teaching Tender Points and would like to invite me to visit your class, feel free to reach out.
-
“TENDER POINTS is a stunning work of feminist literary nonfiction about trauma and chronic pain. I read it without stopping.”
Johanna Fateman
-
“TENDER POINTS does precisely what people are always saying can’t be done—it combines a moving, distilled, literary journey with advocacy and even pedagogy, here about trauma, chronic pain, patriarchy, and more. Call it 'ecriture feminine en homme,' if you want (as Berkowitz does, with acid wit)—but whatever you call it, this is firm, high-stakes speech speaking truth to power, radiating beauty and fierceness from its inspiring insistence and persistence."
Maggie Nelson
-
“TENDER POINTS is a kind of personal detective story about trauma and the body that interrogates chronic pain literature and ’90s cartoons, noise music and Anne Carson, medical listserv comment boards and video art. It’s urgent, haunting, meticulously crafted, darkly comic, and it has the strangest, smartest structure of anything I’ve read this year. Truly unclassifiable."
Brian Gittis, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (FSG’s Favorite Books of 2016)
-
“Any feminist punk, nerd, arty woman who is struggling with ‘mystery’ illness should read TENDER POINTS. It’s the heaviest book in the best way, the kind that provides motivation.”
Sini Anderson
-
“TENDER POINTS describes Berkowitz’s experiences in short, episodic vignettes that are sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking. In straightforward, haunting and epigrammatic prose, Berkowitz makes the link between rape, trauma, and women’s sick bodies clear and personal."
Emily Gould
-
”I read TENDER POINTS in one day and went back to reread it the next. All my annotations are basically nods: ‘Yes,’ I wrote. ‘Me too.’ TENDER POINTS was the first illness narrative I’d read in which the protagonist’s journey through Susan Sontag’s ‘kingdom of the sick’ doesn’t end when the book does.”
Amy Long, BOMB
-
“An exquisite, lyrical exploration of chronic pain, TENDER POINTS is a standout.”
The Kenyon Review
-
“Devastatingly and beautifully written.”
Esmé Weijun Wang
-
“This year, the public dialogue on consent and rape was perhaps more audible in mainstream media than ever before. But few personal contributions to that discussion are as complex and thought-provoking as Amy Berkowitz’ book of poetic prose, TENDER POINTS."
Sarah Burke, East Bay Express
-
“In TENDER POINTS, Amy Berkowitz wields short form prose like a hammer. With necessary rage and introspection, she urges us to understand our personal, physical, and emotional pain not only as our own, but as incompletely distinct from that of culture at large.”
Emily Oppenheimer, Full Stop
-
“Amy Berkowitz has written a powerful, thought-provoking, and occasionally darkly funny book on trauma and chronic pain. Would recommend to anyone who loves Bluets, The Empathy Exams, or Heroines by Kate Zambreno.”
Leigh Stein
-
“TENDER POINTS has a particular place in my heart. I had years of therapy behind me, but it was only in reading this book that I allowed myself to consider my history of trauma, a history deeply connected to the story of all women.”
Julie Delporte