Corpus in Extremis: A Memoir

Loretta Smith

To an observer I am simply a sleeping patient in a hospital bed in recovery. One of rows and rows and rooms full of us. But what small miracles are occurring? How do we right ourselves, our physical bodies, and bring the rest—psyche, soul, ether—into alignment? Protection is required lest one surfaces with fault lines …

Loretta Smith is renowned as the bestselling author of A Spanner in the Works, the biography of Alice Anderson, the ‘garage girl’. Now in Corpus in Extremis, Loretta shares the details of her own fascinating and incredible life; a life in which she has had to negotiate the pain, physical restrictions, and medical interventions of Osteogenesis Imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease.

She shows that despite being a patient for a lifetime, she has survived, and even thrived with an imaginative brain more agile than her body. You will be charmed, challenged, and will laugh out loud at her wit and ingenuity and as she embarks on travel, engages in work, grapples with family and relationships and takes up creative endeavours, all while enduring continuous medical treatments.

Loretta explores what it is to reside in a body pushed to the extreme; what it is to be human, to be fractured, to be whole and to heal. She lucidly argues that nobody escapes being disabled, disenfranchised or othered in one way or another.

As long as we stand in light there is always shadow, always something to challenge truth, justice, knowledge, physical and mental wellbeing. As humans we are at once strong, yet vulnerable, immutable and forever changing.

Corpus in Extremis is an extraordinary story of survival and resilience against considerable challenges centred around Smith’s brittle bones. Despite all, she tells her memoir with vigour and good humour taking the ‘dis’ out of disability and wiping the floor with it.
—Sara Hardy, author of The Unusual Life of Edna Walling and A Secretive Life

This exquisitely written memoir tells compelling tales about broken bones and heartbreak, as well as about one extraordinary woman’s strong-willed and creative mind and quiet courage. While Smith navigates difficulties unimaginable to most of us in her everyday, she’s woven out of their painful threads such a vital story of a passionately lived life that I found it difficult to part with the book when it came to an end.
—Lee Kofman, author of The Writer Laid Bare and Imperfect

4 JUNE 2024 | ISBN 9781922964069 | Paperback | 200 pages | 152 mm x 228 mm