At first, the idea of a memoir focusing on an extended period of mysterious and crippling vaginal pain might seem like the height of solipsistic narcissism, the ultimate act of quasi-feminist navel-gazing. But as she proved with Girl, Interrupted, the bestselling account of her time spent in an upscale psychiatric hospital during the '60s, Susanna Kaysen excels at tackling tricky subject matter with a spare, elegant prose style devoid of self-indulgence, sentimentality, and pretension. A sequel and companion piece of sorts to Girl, Interrupted, The Camera My Mother Gave Me covers another harrowing interlude in Kaysen's life, a time during which vaginal distress led her to seek relief from a deadening battery of doctors, alternative healers, nurses, and internists. Each prescribed a different solution, ranging from oatmeal baths to surgery to ointments. But nothing seemed to work, which raised the frightening prospect that Kaysen's condition might be psychological—or at least psychosomatic. Kaysen's duress also put a tremendous strain on her relationship with her younger, less educated lover, whose lusty earthiness, an initially appealing trait, took on a menacing quality once Kaysen became unable to have intercourse without excruciating pain. Exceedingly frank in its explicit details and emotional candor, Camera derives much of its power from its unflinching honesty and refusal to sugarcoat any aspect of Kaysen's trauma. As in Interrupted, the author refrains from imposing meaning on her ordeal. Instead, she allows haunting themes of aging, sexuality, class, and death to develop organically from the details of her experiences. In Kaysen's work, as in real life, bad things often happen to people for no discernible reason, and few writers capture that pain as vividly and compellingly.