Body in Script

In the summer of 1994, months after graduating from San Francisco State University, Chava meets Stephen at a pristine, granite-lined, Sierra snowmelt pool of the Yuba River. Chava, a live-in nanny with plans to travel to Europe for adventure in six months, finds herself, instead, hospitalized with double-pneumonia and a collapsed lung. Stephen is by her side as she awakens from the thoracic surgery that saves her life. The couple emerges without question as to their devotion to one another, though Chava is changed forever after. The illness and subsequent surgery trigger anorexia that lay in wait beneath years of body dysmorphia, exercise addiction, and fat phobia.

Stephen believes in Chava and in his dream to renovate a condemned Tudor cottage-style house in Midtown Sacramento. As Chava and Stephen move into their fixer-upper and live for years in their construction zone, they learn that with time, love and action can absorb trauma.

Body in Script is a novel in stories that documents Chava Wiseman's life as a woman who is trying to learn how to survive the nature of being contained in her body, home, marriage, and memories. Chava uses her various malfunctions and maladies, including PTSD as a result of sexual abuse, a severe eating disorder, and the emergence of a rare auto-immune condition, to examine her identity and her purpose for living. With the support of Stephen's undying loyalty, she proves herself able to endure and accept the paradox of living in a body that doesn't often recognize what is for her and what is against her.

Each chapter of Body in Script begins with an illustration drawn by the author's husband, S. Paul Imagine. This fictional narrative of their shared life captures their relationship over the course of two decades. This is a true love story.