The Tiger and the Cage

In Catholic grade school, Emma Bolden has a strange, intimate experience with a teacher that unleashes a short-lived chronic coughing spell – something the medical establishment will later use against her, as she struggles through chronic pain and fainting spells that coincide with her menstrual cycle. With The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden uses her own experience as the starting point for a journey through the institutional misogyny of Western medicine – from a history of labeling women "hysterical" and parading them as curiosities, to a lack of information on causes or cures for endometriosis, despite the fact that it was discovered before the Civil War. Recounting botched surgeries, her own and those of others, Bolden speaks to the ways people are often failed by institutions meant to protect them, which protect themselves by controlling official narratives. Bolden also interrogates her own narrative – the story arc of marriage and children commonly imposed on a menstruating body. Sometimes, it is a painful site she mentally escapes. It is also a countdown she hopes to beat by having a child before a hysterectomy – only later finding language and acceptance for her asexuality. Through all of its gripping, devastating, and beautiful threads, The Tiger and the Cage says what Bolden and so many like her have needed to hear: I see you, and I believe you.