The chick and the dead Life and death behind mortuary doors

THE SUBFIELD OF feminist scholarship devoted to narratives of what's commonly referred to as "the body" is having something of a heyday. Disability studies are growing in popularity, as is the prominence of intersectional theories around gender, body modification and "the politics of difference." Often, the lines of inquiry (or "interrogations," as academics like to say) concern themselves with power dynamics imposed by cultural norms, including those that conspire to make physicality itself a form of trauma. But three new memoirs dealing with bodies - often exuberantly so - would appear to have little use for the trauma narrative. Hida Viloria, the author of born both: An Intersex Life (Hachette, $27), was born with "ambiguous" genitalia, raised as a girl, and was 26 before encountering the term "intersex." Growing up, Viloria, who prefers the pronouns "s/he" and "he/r," aligned with the idea of being an androgynous-looking woman who was primarily attracted to other women. Viloria's most notable anatomical variant, a larger-than-average clitoris, proved to be a greater source of pleasure than of shame, and so there was little incentive to investigate the root cause, much less fix what wasn't broken. As a memoir, "Born Both" can be as difficult to pin down as its author's identity. Equal parts life history, anatomy textbook, sex diary and public service announcement, it seems in places to have been written as an activist gesture rather than a literary one. Gaining visibility as a public spokesperson for the intersex community, Viloria appears on "20/20" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and fights for causes such as outlawing the "normalizing" surgery now referred to as I.G.M., or intersex genital mutilation, which many intersex people undergo as infants. As such, the final third of the book devolves somewhat into a morass of abbreviations, reports from conferences, and policy discussions folded into canned dialogue. But all this can be forgiven because amid the public service announcements, Viloria does us the even greater service (it's more of a gift, really) of showing us what it means to live not just as both a man and a woman but also as a third gender that eventually emerges as the right one. It's not hard to see why. Many Native American tribes "believed that, unlike regular people," intersex people "had an elevated view of life's experiences and could 'see down both sides of the mountain,' " Viloria writes. Viloria also shows how gender privilege works both ways. Despite enjoying the swaggering confidence that comes from presenting as male, Viloria tires of "the limitations around expressing my emotions and the tough veneer that I have to put on to protect myself every time I get around a group of young men." Roughed up by cops while getting arrested at a protest in Berkeley, Viloria finds that the police suddenly become gentler when they believe they're dealing with a girl instead of a boy. The charges are later dropped. "I know getting out of trouble wouldn't have been so easy if I hadn't been able to hide behind being a girl," Viloria writes. "I'm completely aware that I played that card." The author's life experiences, especially the sexual ones, have a greater range than most of us could possibly imagine. Viloria has sex with both women and men as both a woman and as a man (stop and think about that for a moment). In daily interactions with the world, Viloria has seen down both sides of the mountain and tunneled through for good measure. Ultimately, there's no need to choose a side. "'I'm both,"' Viloria says. "Or alternatively, 'I'm neither.'" The bodies in Carla Valentine's the chick and THE DEAD: Life and Death Behind Mortuary Doors (St. Martin's, $25.99) belong to other people - or at least did at one time. Valentine, who now curates a collection at Barts Pathology Museum in London, worked for eight years in Britain as a certified A.P.T., or anatomical pathology technician. The book covers this period, one in which Valentine spends her days assisting in autopsies and other forensic investigations by removing organs from corpses, replacing those organs post-examination (at least when possible) and then sewing, washing and grooming the bodies into presentability. As a child, Valentine recounts, she tried to perform autopsies on her toys and was "enthralled by any dead animal I found on the street." After university she pursued an advanced degree in forensic and biomolecular sciences and gets an entry-level gig at the mortuary, cleaning up after organ dissections (the job requires steel-toed Wellington boots). Eventually, she was hired as a trainee A.P.T. "And thus," Valentine writes, "began a new chapter of my life in death." "The Chick and the Dead," which spins its title from the well-worn idiom "the quick and the dead," is filled with such turns of phrase, and Valentine's tone, which is meant to come across as playfully irreverent, sometimes gives way to glibness if not a surfeit of cheesy puns. Scarce space in mortuary refrigerators is described as "popular real estate; people are dying to get in there after all." Nor can she resist reminding us that "working in a mortuary is not a dead-end job." But even though Valentine might have the sense of humor of an aging uncle, her zest for gross-out depictions of bodily functions rivals that of any 10-year-old boy. And it actually works spectacularly well, at least if you're into that kind of thing. In a chapter focusing on the five stages of decomposition, she has no problem telling us about the preservatory effects of maggots - "many experts call them 'the unseen undertakers of the world' " - or the time she cut into a distended abdomen and "the green, taut flesh rippled and burst like a balloon from hell and I was rewarded with a face full of the most hideous gas I'd ever smelled in my entire life." If the book succeeds as a morbidly galloping parade of every possible kind of dead body, it falls short when it comes to the author's life. There are occasional mentions of parents, references to ever-changing roommates, and a disastrous affair with a co-worker, but they form a blurry background against the sharp focus of the cadavers. For what it's worth, Valentine's bio says she runs a dating and networking site for death professionals, a detail that may or may not have any relevance to her observation in the book that "watching someone carry out an autopsy is, in many ways, like watching someone have sex." Let's maybe not stop and think about that for a moment. A more genteel exploration of life's inevitable decay can be found in Martha Cooley's GUESSWORK: A Reckoning With Loss (Catapult, paper, $16.95). This splendid and subtle memoir in essays captures 14 months in the ancient rural village of Castiglione del Terziere in northern Ttiscany. Cooley is on sabbatical from her teaching job in New York City, though the word she's chosen for this leave of absence is caesura, which refers to a break between words or notes in a line of poetry or music: "In life - mine, anyway - it's a deliberate interruption, a chance to reckon with divisions imposed by loss." The losses have been piling up. Cooley has lost friends to drugs and suicide and cancer and various other illnesses. Her parents are in declining health, another friend lives in the diabolical grip of A.L.S., silent and immobile even as his brain carries on. Her husband of just a few years is a widower; his late wife was Cooley's close friend. "She was my age, 57, when back pain turned into rampant cancer," Cooley writes. "How did the inexplicable happen: her leaving us, loss uniting us?" In "Guesswork," the body is both canvas and carapace, both superficial construct and, for better or worse, the whole damn point. Vacationing on the island of Giglio in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Cooley and her husband find themselves in the literal and figurative shadow of the Costa Concordia, the giant cruise ship that struck a rock and capsized earlier that year, leaving 32 dead and two still missing. The boat has remained partly submerged in the water, a body that can be neither exhumed nor buried. "In the case of tragedy," Valentine writes in "The Chick and the Dead," "demystifying it helps you to regain control of the emotions. I did that with death." If Viloria's demystification of her body evokes a similar reclamation, then Cooley, for her part, knows that she will find equilibrium only if she can fully embrace the wild fluctuations of grief. "On some days I'm lured mesmerically to the rabbit hole of loss, and am forced to thrash around down there like trapped prey," Cooley writes. "On other days all the losses seem to recede like any object in a rearview mirror once the accelerator's been pressed, and I've no trouble keeping my foot on the pedal of the present." It's a lurching way to live; simultaneously brokenhearted and in love, crushingly bereaved one moment and surprisingly O.K. the next. Must we pick a side? Maybe Viloria said it best: "I refused to choose, because... I am both.' " MEGHAN DAUM'S latest book is "The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion." Her column appears every eight weeks.