Bee Lavender’s new book Lessons in Taxidermy (published this spring by the excellent Punk Planet Books) is not visibly political. From the start, this is one woman’s story of growing up with serious illness, borne of her own particular history and secrets. At the same time, Lavender knows that her personal is political on every level, from her parents’ struggle to pay her medical bills to her mother having lived near a naval warfare station while she was pregnant with Bee. Factors like these no doubt contributed to Lavender’s health problems - whether directly or to her experience of them - but they are not her immediate targets. Lavender’s memoir is raw and devastating, a powerful, well-told story. Her self awareness and political consciousness result in a book that is a standout in the crowded field of personal memoir.

Lessons is a slim book and an almost uncomfortably fast read. When it opens, it is the middle of the night and Lavender suddenly finds herself in excruciating pain, incapacitated not just by the physical pain but by the sense of dread that comes with it. Her account of going to the hospital to deal with this latest illness is interwoven with stories about a childhood and adolescence full of sickness, a past that lies behind the thoughts and interactions she has in this new situation. Lavender spent her childhood battling a range of serious and potentially fatal illnesses, which were then compounded by injuries she sustained in a terrible car crash as a teenager, and put to another test by her dangerous pregnancy at eighteen. Each diagnosis feels like a fresh insult. Still, Lavender never stops to mourn her lost childhood. She doesn’t resort to empowering recovery-speak. All of this makes the book impossible to put down.

Over years of illness, Lavender encountered doctors baffled by her condition, and others who were afraid or unwilling to admit the same. Other doctors treated her like a fascinating specimen. Her experiences provoke fresh outrage at the way people in positions of authority often treat women and kids. At one point, Lavender’s junior high teacher demands that she justify un-excused absences by “proving” that she has cancer. After a horrible car accident in which she was not at fault, a doctor tells her that her friends are dead, and that this should be a lesson “next time you want to go out joyriding.” Lavender is remarkably measured in this telling, not so analytical as her book’s title might suggest, but calm in a way that could be mistaken for numbness if her observations weren’t so pointed.

Because her earlier work focused largely on parenting issues (and still does), Lavender has noted many people’s surprise at learning her medical history. Somewhere in there is the idea that an artist or activist’s life (and especially their traumas) should be evident in their work. Lavender doesn’t refute this assumption, but she does point to the fact that a person’s past can be difficult to see. “My primary identity is found in my body, in the scars, in the injuries and injustice and disease and decay,” Lavender writes. “My genetic code conveys the simple truth that I’m a freak; no other information about me is relevant. But nobody can see that now. The clothes and family and job act as refraction, creating an illusion to distract people from seeing the truth.”

It would be easy for Lessons in Taxidermy to be the kind of book that makes you nervous and hyper-aware of the fragility of your body, or makes you feel as if your own pain pales in comparison to Lavender’s. But it doesn’t. Lessons is ultimately as much about a search for safety and control as it is about being sick. The real lessons are in the telling: in putting a personal story on paper, in hands and on shelves, and letting it contribute to some movement forward.