Limbo: A Memoir

From childhood, acclaimed novelist A. Manette Ansay trained to become a concert pianist. But at nineteen, a mysterious muscle disorder forced her to give up the piano, and by twenty-one, she couldn't grip a pen or walk across a room. She entered a world of limbo, one in which no one could explain what was happening to her or predict what the future would hold. At twenty-three, beginning a whole new life in a motorized wheelchair, Ansay made a New Year's resolution to start writing fiction, rediscovering the sense of passion and purpose she thought she had lost for good. "Writing fiction began for me as a side effect of illness, a way to live beyond my body when it became clear that this new, altered body would be mine to keep. A way to fill the hours that had once been occupied by music. A way to achieve the kind of closure that, once, I'd found in prayer."Limbo takes its title from the Catholic belief in a place between heaven and hell that is neither, one that Ansay imagines as "a gray room without walls, a gray floor, a gray bench . . . .You wouldn't know how long you'd been in that room, or how much longer you had to go." ThirtAnsay, A. Manette is the author of 'Limbo: A Memoir' with ISBN 9780688172862 and ISBN 0688172865.