Sally Jane Brown
An earnest review
Dear Readers,
Welcome to a new week! To usher in the week, we have something quite different today. It’s our first book review post by Sally Jane Brown. Sally has written a review about a memoir she read called Dizzy by Rachel Weaver. We enjoyed Sally’s sincere comments on the memoir and we hope you’ll enjoy the review too. Let us know if it convinces you to read the memoir, and support the memoir if you can! We’d love to know your thoughts if and when you read the memoir.
Sally Jane Brown is an award-winning artist, curator, and writer whose work in drawing, painting, and mixed media explores womanhood, motherhood, and the body. She has exhibited nationally and in the UK and completed residencies in the U.S. and Argentina. She has illustrated four books, including Feverdream (March 2026 with poetry by Renée K. Nicholson). Her writing appears in The Conversation, and Women’s Art Journal, among others. She curates nationally and serves as Curator for West Virginia University Libraries. sallyjanebrown.com / @sallery_art
DIZZY: A Memoir, by Rachel Weaver
WVU Press, Feb. 2026
https://wvupressonline.com/dizzy
Review by Sally Jane Brown
Dizzy is not a metaphor. It is not the passing spin of a childhood tumble, a bout of food poisoning, or the lovesick swoon of Tommy Roe’s 1969 pop refrain. In Rachel Weaver’s memoir, Dizzy names something far more brutal: a fourteen-year, day-in and day-out experience of complete disequilibrium.
Weaver’s account is both harrowing and precise, made even more striking by its contrast with her “Before” life as an adventurous outdoorswoman. She opens the book with one such Before moment, a vividly rendered scene of ice skating in Alaska. The calm, cold beauty gives way to a sudden, unsettling fall into the ice itself, a moment that quietly foreshadows the disorienting collapse to come.
Throughout the book, Weaver demonstrates an extraordinary ability to describe dizziness in fresh, visceral ways, inviting readers into an experience that is otherwise nearly impossible to imagine. When the symptoms first strike, she writes, “I opened my eyes to the walls of the bedroom folding and sliding and picking up speed. In the thin, blue-gray light of morning, the room gathered itself into a proper hurricane” (5). The sensation is immediate. The reader feels the room spin.
Later, during one of countless medical appointments, she captures the exhausting effort of trying to be understood while barely staying upright: “I tried to focus, to make the most out of the allotted time, but I was consumed with trying to stay upright as the room boiled around me. My brain had turned to gelatin so that when I tried to explain what had been happening, I forgot parts, and my sentences drifted off into incoherence” (79). The passage conveys both her physical distress and her determination to be a “good” patient, even as nausea and fatigue overwhelm her.
In quieter moments, the dizziness intrudes just as relentlessly. Attempting to read, she writes, “After a few pages, words slipped and slid, my stomach lurched as if I were on a roller coaster, and I’d have to close my eyes and ride out the imagined but real Space Mountain” (106). Ordinary acts become ordeals.
Taken together, these scenes lend the memoir an almost horror-like atmosphere, reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Like Gilman’s narrator, Weaver encounters a medical system that repeatedly fails her. Of the more than thirty healthcare providers she consults, most are unable or unwilling to help. While Weaver is not overtly gaslit in the way Gilman’s protagonist is, she is dismissed, overlooked, and brushed aside. The result is similar: mounting despair, repeated breakdowns, and a sense that the illness itself becomes a character, one she names and personifies, complete with moods and tempers.
A crucial difference, however, is that The Yellow Wallpaper is fiction, while Dizzy is not. Gilman imagined a woman driven to madness by medical neglect; Weaver documents its real-world consequences. The terror in Dizzy is not symbolic or allegorical but lived, sustained over fourteen years, and unfolding within contemporary systems that still struggle to hear women in pain.
Yet Weaver persists. She handwrites book proposals, works in a lab, and raises twins, all while living inside a body that refuses to stabilize. Both Dizzy and The Yellow Wallpaper reveal how women struggle for sanity and care within systems that operate over them rather than for them.
Notably, Weaver often extends grace to doctors and to those she calls the “well-land” people, excusing their inability to understand or listen. This impulse feels deeply gendered, echoing long-standing expectations that women remain agreeable, patient, and non-confrontational even when their needs are unmet.
The memoir’s emotional relief comes through its returns to Weaver’s Before life. These scenes are anything but gentle: being caught in a violent storm at sea, flying in a tiny plane through fog near mountains, narrowly escaping bears, climbing trees to rescue birds from destruction. Ironically, the experiences that once made her feel most alive would make many readers physically ill. The contrast between this fearless woman and the one later unable to look at a computer screen for more than moments is stark, unsettling, and propulsive.
Without spoiling the ending, the book moves through years of frustration, financial strain, and failed treatments ranging from acupuncture to specialists of every kind. Weaver documents it all meticulously, even tracking her medical journey in a spreadsheet. After so many disappointments, the conclusion offers hope, and a clearer vision of what authentic, compassionate healthcare can look like.
The cover art deserves mention as well. The artist renders dizziness through a duplicated image of a young woman’s face, weary but direct, intersected by jagged red and black lines. The uneven title lettering mirrors instability, while the vertical placement of the author’s name reinforces tension. The reds suggest intensity and alarm; the black lines, danger. And yet the woman’s gaze remains steady, signaling resilience and resolve.
Ultimately, Dizzy is an essential book for women, for those living with invisible pain, and for anyone who has had to dismantle countless barriers just to be believed. Weaver writes, “But there were too many boundaries between us: sick/healthy, patient/provider, broke/probably not broke, not able to think/able to think, powerful/weak. Impossible to get through” (87). This memoir suggests that through art and writing grounded in lived experience, those boundaries can begin to soften. In doing so, Dizzy asks us to imagine a healthcare system rooted not only in expertise, but in listening, humility, and care.
Dizzy inaugurates Connective Tissue, a WVU Press series exploring health, illness, and healing through the humanities, with a focus on lived experience and arts-based approaches to care. https://wvupressonline.com/series/connective_tissue
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