A thoughtful and evocative read, Soriano writes beautifully about living in a body marked by intergenerational trauma.

A powerful personal narrative linking colonial history, intergenerational trauma, and neuroscience to how we live in our bodies when the experience of pain is one’s “first relationship.” This beautifully written and researched book offers insight into the unique circumstances of this author’s story and their willingness to learn from an array of therapeutic modalities. An inspiring and entirely fresh take on personal history.

Jen Soriano writes an excellent memoir in essays that interconnects personal history, health, the natural environment, and the history the Philippines. Soriano studied the history of science at Harvard, so it may come as no surprise that she begins her book with a detailed chronology of the history of medicine and its approaches to the nervous system. Starting with the Kahun Papyrus medical documents from 1900 B.C. which were written by women and focused on women's health, continuing on to Santiago Ramon y Cajal who compared the nervous system to a system of waterways, and including the year 1980 when the American Psychological Association finally stopped using the term hysteria and replaced it with stress disorder, Soriano pinpoints important developments in research on the nervous system, especially as it applies to women.

Why this emphasis? Jen Soriano describes herself as someone who has always been nervous. For more than a decade, she had a series of diagnoses connected to her nervous system. Not only did she suffer from nervous disorders, but she was also in chronic pain. Because she had violent dreams about her grandparents for three decades, she came to the conclusion that the war experiences of her forebears -- her grandfather was tortured as a prisoner of war and her grandmother's home was enemy occupied -- lived on inside her.

Soriano was born in the U.S., but her book demystifies the concept of Filipinos as simply agricultural and then healthcare migrants to America. She delineates the three hundred and fifty years of Spanish colonialism, the 1896 revolt by Filipinos against Spain, the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the sale of Filipino territory by Spain to the U.S. for $20 million dollars. During World War II, Filipino citizens became victims of horrendous war crimes during the Japanese occupation. Soriano describes how the people of the Philippines resisted decade after decade and century after century.

While the writer concluded that she had inherited within her own body the violent history of her progenitors, her parents, who were both medical professionals, dismissed her rationalizations and complaints. Thus, it was left to Soriano to seek out healing experiences with other specialists and to engage in the healing process by way of social activism. One of her pivotal experiences was joining activists to resist the damning of the Chico River in the Philippines. The Chico River is the country's largest river, and it has sustained the farming, trading, and daily life of the indigenous people who live nearby and farther afield. For more than five decades, activists have resisted plans for the construction of hydropower dams on the river system.

Soriano's activism and her memoir in essays titled Nervous highlight the manner in which the plundering of natural resources is a continuation of colonialism, exploitation, and trauma. To move beyond trauma, we have to take care of the waterways in our nervous systems and the waterways in our natural environment.

Much like What My Bones Know my Stephanie Foo, this book provided a deep exploration of the author's experience of complex trauma and its effects on her body. But rather than using her experience as the starting point, Jen Soriano moves up her family line to further investigate the intergenerational aspects of trauma and how our histories are coded into our bodies and psyches. She names war, colonization, and so many other historical events in both the larger and personal spheres to illustrate a map of her contexts. This sort of rich study is the kind I would love to open up more space to so that people could seek healing in community as well as individually.

This is a collection of memoirs that are stunningly written. They are raw, honest, and well-researched. I always struggle with trying to say I had a good time reading non-fiction, as I usually say that for fiction. However, I truly did have a good time reading this and have used some things mentioned within my work setting -- I work in the mental health field.

To begin with, I'd been waiting for this book - literally and metaphorically - for a long time. In the most literal terms, I saw Jen Soriano on a Zoom writers panel during the pandemic and was so intrigued by what she said that I knew I would read whatever she published as soon as I could. When Nervous came up on my NetGalley feed, I jumped at the chance to get my hands on that Advanced Readers Copy (ARC).

In terms of metaphorical waiting, where do I start? An American-born Global Majority woman writing about ancestral trauma? Birth injury? The effed up history of American Imperialism? Dancing with a handsome mysterious man at a wedding? Count me in.

In simplest terms, Nervous is a collection of essays chronicling the chronic pain Soriano has suffered over her lifetime and the many paths she's explored in search of understanding and relief. Technically, that makes it an illness memoir and a medical detective story. And yet Soriano is more than a patient; the curiosity and rigor she's inherited from her surgeon father have make her an engaging historian of how science has interpreted the nervous system through time.

She is also a Filipina-American who tells her stories knowing that, rather than an isolated individual, she is a single strand in a web which includes not only her family, but her people, her people's nation and, in my reading, anyone whose family history cannot be accurately told without the lenses of racism, colonialism, and greed.

Before I picked up Nervous, I knew little about Philippines history beyond Imelda Marcos' closet of shoes and I understood in only the broadest strokes how, over the centuries, Japan, Spain, and the US have all made it their territorial football at one time or another. Through the Soriano's history of her family, she makes it clear how much Filipinos have paid, and continue to pay, for being tossed around.

If it sounds like Nervous contains multitudes, it does; but Soriano's mad chops as a writer give her an astonishing capacity to braid her wide-ranging observations into one engaging and coherent piece of work. In fact, her accomplishment inspires me to plainly restate for the umpteenth time that my passion for the Global Majority storytellers I love stems from this: they know in their bones that there is no separation between their selves and their worlds.

They know that no personal history exists in a bubble;
know that family traumas stem from global violence;
that our genetic inheritance is shaped by the systems in which our ancestors lived;
that national ideals are often just fancy ways to justify violence;
and that the conflicts of history live not only in the books written by the winners but in bodies capable of revealing truths the winners still want to keep hidden.
And they write from that knowledge.
Some of us can't even tell our family stories without also providing the details of the treaties and bad deals that gave rise to them.

That said -- as someone whose family tragedies are also deeply embedded with global horror and the impact of colonization -- I could not put this book down. Unlike Soriano's family, my family histories will likely remain a mystery forever, but reading about her family's ordeals was nevertheless healing. Her passionate, intelligent storytelling is not only a testimony to how family history can be passed down through the body but an affirmation of the healing power which lies in acknowledging that history. I have deep GRATITUDE for Nervous; it is necessary, fascinating, and powerful. If you have dealt with the mystery of pain and the possibility that the pains which you suffer did not start with you, read it.

Powerful, informative, moving, eloquent -- this checked all the boxes for me in terms of trauma memoir. It's not the usual narrative, but a set of essays exploring the author's pain and her quest for healing from a number of different angles, with overlapping and complementary content. She has done a huge amount of research, both in her own experience and learning from others, which can be useful to others, even if they don't have quite the massive obstacles that she has. I know it will inform my own ongoing investigation of how to heal generational and inherited trauma in myself. An important book in the growing field of traumatology.

What. A. Book!

I was already a fan of Jen Soriano well before an advanced copy of "Nervous" landed in my hands. Her essays in literary magazines have sparked my imagination and inspired me for years. But I had no idea how much "Nervous" would mean to me as a reader.

It's a pleasure to see some of Soriano's exceptional essays take new form in this book. The first time I read their/her words in "A Brief History of Her Pain," I was on public transit and had one of those moments of epiphany that what I was holding in my hands was EXCEPTIONAL. I love seeing how the author remixed this essay and another favorite of mine, "War-Fire," in insightful ways in "Nervous."

What I was not prepared for was the artful crescendo that Soriano builds as this book progresses. I think my favorite essay in this book is "Awaken the Lyrics," a piece so beautiful and moving that I felt like it held me by the shoulders and shook me with a sense of amazement. Any reader is going to pick up that Soriano is not only a gifted writer, but also has an ear finely attuned to music, and this essay brings to life a scene and a community that I don't know at all and makes it feel real, intimate and special. I feel like that essay will make an artist's heart sing, no matter the medium they practice in.

As the book builds toward its conclusion, there are still more moments of surprise, beauty and visceral honesty. I have never read such a full description of the emotional roller-coaster that is pregnancy and child birth, and the world needs more writing like Soriano's. I think this section in particular is going to make a lot of birthing parents, especially those who have C-PTSD, feel seen.

Healing is hard work, and I believe it's a never-ending journey, but one that a person commits themself to every damn day. I feel like Soriano captured that process in stunning detail in "Nervous," and I'm so excited for readers to find it. It's amazing.

Raw, honest, and well-researched. This book is a cathartic sharing of how generational trauma affects bodies and ecosystems at large. In 14 essays connected by theme and experience with titles such as Mobility, War-Fire, and 381 Years, Soriano weaves together memory, history, sociology, personal/family stories, neuroscience and public health into a remarkable memoir. With Nervous, the healing continues.

A new must read for anyone interested in disability justice. I love how much this adds to the existing canon while expounding on those who have come before. Moving, deep, and enthralling. Pick this up immediately!!

Fascinating and vividly written narrative which taught me so much about post-colonialism and the wars the Phillipines have experienced--devastating. I found the narrator incredibly interesting with a unique perspective.