In this gripping new memoir by New South Wales journalist and author Sonya Voumard, a rare neurological condition becomes a way to examine the unpredictability of life.

How to tell the story of an illness without a metaphorical framework to decode it, without medical understanding or widespread cultural recognition? How to tell the story of an ill life without a clear beginning, middle, or end?

Review: Tremor, A Movement Disorder in a Disordered World – Sonya Voumard (Finlay Lloyd)

The memoir documents Voumard’s early life, including her father’s untimely passing in her youth, her decades-long career in journalism and corporate writing, and her embrace of her identity as both queer and disabled.

As Tremor details, Voumard felt her hands begin to shake in her childhood, a tremble she shared with her recently deceased father. Over time, as the tremor grows more potent, and more visible to others, she begins to search for an explanation, an underlying cause, and possibly a treatment.

After a chance encounter with a radiologist neighbour, Voumard is referred to Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital. She is diagnosed with dystonia, a movement disorder that also comes with muscle pain, fatigue, issues with balancing and vision problems, and which currently has no cure.

This late-in-life bombshell, while a relief in the sense that it provides a language for what was previously unspeakable, challenges her sense of self: is the tremor an alien and “unwelcome force within [her] body,” a link to her deceased father, or an essential part of Voumard’s identity?

Treating her tremor with regular injections of gabapentin, a drug used to treat epilepsy, as well as Botox injections to freeze the muscles which tremble, works to some degree, but in an attempt to effect long-lasting relief from her tremor Voumard pursues an experimental surgery. Known as a thalamotomy, this surgery directs radio waves to........

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