A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck by Lightning - Hardcover

Ehrlich, Gretel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679425500 ISBN 13: 9780679425502

Publisher: Pantheon, 1994

Synopsis

The author describes her experience of being struck by lightning in August 1991, her struggle back to health, and the physical, psychological, and spiritual impact of the accident

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

An odyssey of recovery by a woman literally struck by lightning. In the summer of 1991, Ehrlich (Islands, The Universe, Home, 1991, etc.) was hit by lightning while out walking with her dogs on the land around her Wyoming ranch. Ehrlich has not written another near-death testimonial but a peripatetic probe into the nature of the healing of the human heart. Suffering from ventricular fibrillation (chaotic heartbeat) and a ``fried'' sympathetic nervous system (which is responsible for stimulating the heart muscle and raising blood pressure), Ehrlich is rescued from bumbling, ineffectual treatment in Wyoming that might have killed her and delivered into the hands of a heart specialist/healer named Blaine in Santa Barbara, Calif. The drama of her shaky recovery is more gripping than the final two-thirds of the book, which meanders from musings about various cultural readings of lightning, the heart, and death to thoughts about the healing power of water over lightning and fire as Ehrlich treks to London, then zigzags back and forth between California and Wyoming, then on to Alaska before finally coming to rest off the Santa Barbara coast after a symbolic dive into the ocean. At times the prose is a pedestrian record of events: retrieving her favorite dog or following cardiologist Blaine on his rounds. At other times, Ehrlich strains to give her experience more depth and insight by interspersing the mundane with, say, Ecuadoran myths about the connection between being struck by lightning and becoming a shaman. Ehrlich may want these myths to be ``enlightening,'' but she is at her best when she writes from her own feelings: ``Lightning had entered me twice and now I was a burnt shell with nothing in me that could attract fire.'' An emotionally compelling, if erratically beating, tale about the transformative power of a brush with death by lightning. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Fans of Ehrlich's intensely observant, philosophical, and spiritual books, including The Solace of Open Spaces (1985) and Islands, the Universe, and Home (1991), would have been eager to read any new work, even if she didn't have a story as astonishing and unexpected as this: Ehrlich was struck by lightning while walking in her beloved Wyoming. She was hurled through the air and seriously injured. Her brain, heart, and nervous system were so damaged it took her more than a year to recover, and she'll never be the same. And yet, as a writer, she is. Somehow Ehrlich was able to apply her profound curiosity, gift for synthesis, and quiet but forceful eloquence to this terrifying experience and create an unforgettable treatise on the little-understood effects of being jolted by millions of volts of electricity. Thunder and lightning are the stuff of myth and the tools of the gods, yet they are also as ordinary and as incredible as the seasons or the intricate, wonderful processes of our body. As Ehrlich struggles to regain her strength, she muses on how self-involving illness is, how subtle the interaction between patient and healer, and how incomprehensible the workings of the brain are to itself. She discovers, in fact, that there is no such thing as the mind-body split, just as there's no such thing as being immune to the forces of nature. Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0679425500
• ISBN 13: 9780679425502
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200