‘Trying to drive a faulty machine’

In This Faulty Machine: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation 
by Kathy Page

Toronto: Viking Canada, 2025
$34.95 / 9781037800887

Reviewed by Trish Bowering

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A fall while running downhill on a mountain trail in the spring of 2018 heralded Salt Spring Island writer Kathy Page’s unwanted border crossing from the land of wellness to “a kind of exile or deportation to another place, the kingdom of the sick.” A significant injury to her right hand, followed by fainting spells diagnosed as viral heart inflammation obscured other changes. She experienced cramped handwriting, physical slowness and tremor, and was eventually diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). 

She is now five years into this transitional time and has penned a memoir that is at once intimate, wryly humorous, and informative as it takes the reader from that tumble on the mountain trail to the present. In This Faulty Machine is her first work of nonfiction after writing short stories and novels (such as Dear Evelyn). This literary transition is just one of many changes in the midst of a new landscape that she is negotiating in the wake of becoming one of the People with Parkinson’s (PWPs, as Page notes).

In order to make sense of moving from wellness to being unwell, Page calls on the idea of the “not-good, sick person passport,” drawing the metaphor from Susan Sontag’s essay Illness as Metaphor. It ushers one into the “kingdom of the sick,” though, “Kingdom is perhaps too grand and old-fashioned a word for this ‘other place’ in which the sick must live,” Page writes, “This simulacrum pretending to be my life is more akin to a modern state, highly bureaucratic, whether totalitarian or merely dysfunctional.” 

Even before she is officially diagnosed, which takes many months, Page must deal with well-meaning friends offering anecdotal cures, the intricacies of disability applications, and her inability to write as she did: “They are asking whether, despite being mysteriously, multiply dysfunctional to the point of being unable to sustain half a teaching load at the university, I am somehow capable of functioning as a novelist, i.e., doing one of the most mentally and physically demanding things there is….” Trying to explain to others is challenging. “Hands, arms, legs, muscles in general are affected, but it is actually rooted in my brain,” Page observes, “I feel as if I am moving through water. As if I’m trying to drive a faulty machine.” 

Page invites us into her experience, and I could acutely feel the anxiety of her long wait for a specialist physician to appear on the scene to confirm her diagnosis of PD. Finally, she’s given a prescription for the first line treatment, a medication that increases dopamine levels, and the absence of symptoms feels like a miracle: 

…how can I describe this loosening of my bonds to someone who has not suffered months of restriction and feeling bewitched?
I’m moving more freely, walking almost normally. Everything’s easier, but far more than that—everything is a pleasure. Imagine: Taking the stairs two at a time. Reaching to the high shelf. Opening a door. Almost slamming it. Pouring water from a jug. Holding a cup in one hand. Emptying the dishwasher: swoop down—up—reach—twist—slot plates in the rack.

Page doesn’t shy away from the difficult details of living with PD, but rather addresses them unflinchingly, with candour and occasionally an exasperated wit. Depending on others, grappling with loss of function, and simply addressing existential dread are all here. Each chapter brings one issue into focus, while progressing through the book in a relatively linear story. 

In the chapter, “Oh, Dopamine!” Page expertly weaves some of the science of PD with her own experiences. The understanding of PD evolved over the twentieth century, finally establishing that a lack of the neurotransmitter dopamine was key in symptom manifestation. It’s seen as “an extraordinarily complicated disease with an ever-growing list of symptoms,” and there’s probably not a single cause. Research indicates that this is a “misfolded” protein, alpha-synuclein, that accumulates and kills off dopamine producing neurons. Science is crucial but will never be able to capture the frustrations of Page’s daily life. “Misfolded? How? By whom? Images of crumpled laundry and veiled robot-nuns come to mind, but all I really need to know is that some kind of error in the chemical manufacture of these proteins has lethal consequences.” 

She’s a master of metaphor, no matter how frustrated she sometimes gets with the metaphors used to describe illness. The equating of illness to a “journey” is particularly sticky. It seems appropriate, capturing the “connection between the danger, suffering, difficulty, and uncertainty met on the trail with tortuous malfunctions which can afflict a body,” but it can also imply that, “suffering will be good for you, even in some way worth it”— 

It’s here that, for me, this characterization of disease slips beyond metaphor–beyond overwrought cliché–into cringe-worthy euphemism: It minimizes suffering, reeks of cover-up, and, worse still, it aims to guide the sufferer as to what to make of their experience, to suggest that they will–or should–find the spiritual silver lining, part of which might be to eventually feel grateful for something that at first sight has nothing to recommend it.

This is a book about a transformation from well to afflicted, from a person who doesn’t have a progressive movement disorder to one who does. Her book is at once very specific to her own Parkinson’s Disease, but also tells other stories. It’s the story of her foray into meditation and flirtation with stoicism; and a cautionary tale about the nature of curiosity, which can make us happier, or lead down a path that reveals too much to cope with. It is the story of her late mother, a paragon of wellness, who eschewed any form of illness and saw it as a failing of character. This chapter, “Mary-Ann,” was perhaps my favourite for its compassionate portrait of her mother.

But like the best of memoir, it also addresses more generally the human condition, and so Page’s book ultimately provides the opportunity for us to engage in self-reflection. PD, she writes, “is an extreme form of what we all need to cope with as we age and acknowledge our mortality, yet it does differ from that more general expectation of slow decline.…” At the same time, when coming to terms with her lack of drive and motivation, particularly with writing, she’s pensive: “I reminded myself that it is not just me: age or injury forces most people to confront the question as to what to do or be instead.” 

In This Faulty Machine is a gift, an act of generativity that offers an honest, straight-from-the-hip account of Page’s direct experience of Parkinson’s Disease, and how it relates to her multifaceted life. Her writing is for herself and for all of us: “It is my bid to connect with both the sick and the (so far) well, to stimulate further connections between them and beyond, to spark further curiosity and increase mutual understanding.” This book speaks to the fact that most of us will face illness and aging, each in our own way. We will all have to dust off our “sick person passport” to navigate Page’s metaphorical border crossing at some point in our lives.

[Editor’s note: Check out Trish Bowering’s interview with Kathy Page on Trish Talks Books. Kathy Page will appear (with Katherine Ashenburg and Merilyn Simonds) at Vancouver Writers Fest on Oct 25, 5pm.]

Trish Bowering lives in Vancouver, where she is immersed in reading, writing, and vegetable gardening. She has an undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Victoria, and obtained her M.D. from UBC. Now retired from her medical practice, she focuses on her love of all things literary. She blogs at TrishTalksBooks.com and reviews on Instagram@trishtalksbooks. [Editor’s note: Trish has recently reviewed books by Diana Hayes, Patrick Tarr, David Bergen, Mikaela Reuben, Natalie Appleton, Nick Perry, Brian Thomas Isaac, Susan Juby, David Asher, and Alison Acheson for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster