Book Review: The Body is a Doorway

The Body is a Doorway by Sophie Strand leads to the doorstep of self-empowerment. It starts with the recognition that the body is rich. Intricate, nature-based systems give us insight to the piece of the puzzle and through that, provide us a way to experience the nectar of interconnectedness that heals our existential longing, if only for a fleeting moment. There’s no need to give our individual power away to narratives of health that are fundamentally based on lack. The Earth is rich.  Our embodiment and beingness is already wealthy in riches regardless of physical status.

The originality of Sophie’s prose reads like a botanist’s journal had a love affair with a professor of postcolonial literature. What results is a perfectly sculpted body of work that takes a steady walk through a diverse ecosystem of healing potential. What struck me most is Sophie’s ability to give bitter medicine in the form of sweet milk. This memoir is autotheory, a format of feminist critique where the normative gaze is woven between information and story. It’s “power through knowledge” and Sophie successfully distances herself from masculine logic and meaning-making. (Fournier 2021) Sophie does bring a queerness to her experience, especially in the forest. The flora and fauna and death-rebirth ecosystem need nothing but themselves to keep on going. By extension, humans need reasons and things beyond themselves. 

The Body is a Doorway gives me a lasting love affair, generous, considering it started as a one-night stand (an evening of bed rotting and reading till 3am and suddenly, the book was done).  This book was an oblique take-down of health “wellness” as a concept and reframed it and self care and disability as differently-abled values. So generous.

Sophie refers so often to mythology, that one must wonder if she has coffee with all the cast of characters or if they are her marathon partners. She talks in myth as fluently and with integrity as a professor. In referring to Penelope’s myth, Sophie weaves and unweaves a death shroud– Death is never finished. This perpetuates the pain of being, which for Sophie seems to lie in the nebulous unknowing of what will set her body into a flare: her stomach to vomit or her nerves to freeze like a deer in headlights. Never escaping, she befriends the value of never-ending. The only story that ends here is her ability to escape pain. For Sophie, and for her readers, the light isn’t at the end of the tunnel; it’s already inside for you to step through.

There’s no trite mention of transcendence. And I know well the healing power of the Catskills (especially Overlook Mountain, mentioned several times in the book)–the right meadow or trailhead or glimpse of golden light at sunset will put you in an altered state. A deep connection to land can activate the transpersonal self–a wide, expansive, or field-like conception of self (Fox, 2017)–and this experience is duly and beautifully conveyed here: 

I ducked under a fringe of ivy trailing down from a stone entryway that had once held a door. Someone had camped on the mountain, setting a fire in the blown-out remains of a hearth. Peppery drafts of ash and pollen streaked through the roofless ballroom. Spiderwebs laced up the windows, long and glassless. Peppermint starbursts of mountain laurel hovered like pink clouds at the top of a staircase that led into open air. (Strand, p. 70)

Can you feel it? Can you be there? Can you step through the empty door or fly through the open window? I work with clients who explore the psycho-spiritual experience. In the years of this work, we do a lot of imagining. The scene  quoted above from The Body is a Doorway, is an invitation that I might use. Step out of your day to day. Step out of normal. Step out of the self that is limited by what you can only see around you. Can you expand into the smell of peppermint starbursts or feel the draft of ash? Where does this imagining take you?

I’ve encountered those who spiritually bypass, unable to drop into the embodiment of their bodies, unable to feel the pain or reaction to any experience. They often say, “It’s the Universe’s plan” or “Just go with the flow.” Dangerous detours. And there are others I’ve encountered who frequent a psychotherapist’s office, without resolve or meaningful progress in reframing their painful inner experience. To both of these individuals I’d recommend Sophie’s book because she does neither. She is able to find stable ground and then she digs deeper, just looking. Sometimes she encounters miniscule but alive ecosystems that remind her of life, and this is what brings her back, despite the spiritual and physical discomfort. A kaleidoscope of poetic descriptions awaits those who dare to drop into Sophie’s body of work. With Sophie, you’re in for a circular experience, a term artist Zara Kand used in a review of an unrelated Surrealist art show referring to the way the artist “negotiated the gallery space… how my mind moved from examination to inquiry to insight and back again.” The surreality of Sophie’s work provides a similar landscape to narrate.

The normative narrative around health is the problem. Remember how I said I found The Body to be an oblique critique? Sophie effectively asks, “Is this a health problem?” When the body doesn’t work as it should, when it generates pain, adverse reaction to life, hemorrhaging function for an embodied and leashed-form of incarnation, of course—there’s a health problem. This is what Hygeia, the goddess of health, would be invoked for. When it’s a question of comfort, Venus is the main character. The journey must go below and beyond the workings of the mainstream narrative of white, cis embodiment. Sophie’s self care and allowing herself to be in flow with the nonhuman world–the spores, the plants, the animals, the collective unconscious–affords her the wealth of disability. There’s so much that lives between the cracks. Broken, breaking, crack, renew, recalibrate, regenerate. The circular experience of weaving a never-ending story in the fabric of ripped, patched, spun. The Body is a Doorway is an excellent manual for your own journey of being and becoming.

 

Email your local library. Have them order a copy. Once you read it, return it, put it back on the shelf like you were planting a seed. Let others discover their power through this work, too.

 

What I was referring to…

Fournier, L. (2002). Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. MIT Press.
Fox, W. (1990). Transpersonal ecology: “Psychologizing” ecophilosophy. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 22(1), 59–96.
Kand, Z. (2024, September 10). A Circular Experience: “With the Moon Under Our Feet” at the Hansell Gallery. https://dispatchesmag.com/review-with-the-moon-under-our-feet/

Strand, S. (2025). The Body is a Doorway: A Memoir. Running Press.

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