UC Medical Humanities Consortium

Operated on as an infant, without anesthesia, Wendy began life at war with her body. In this literary memoir, Wendy takes readers on her difficult sensory journey toward healing, as she communes along the way with horseshoe crabs, dolphins, and other marine life that taught her the restorative power of beauty, resilience, and interdependence. Autobiography of a Sea Creature portrays the dissociative experience of trauma and the roots of self-destructive cycles, as well as the tragic results of medical beliefs at the time that infants could not feel pain. This book is both a love letter to the earth and a hopeful testament of humans’ capacity to heal our deepest wounds.