When poet Molly McCully Brown started work on her newest book, Places I’ve Taken My Body: Essays (Persea, June 2), she was adamant that she did not want to write a memoir. “My sense was that unless you have some extraordinary distance, don’t write a memoir before you turn 30,” she says. “Of course, that’s what happened,” she confesses. “It isn’t a linear memoir, but it is a memoir.”

Brown, however, is not your typical 28-year-old. She was born with cerebral palsy; her twin sister died shortly after birth. Places I’ve Taken My Body is her third book; her first, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, won Persea’s 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. Her second, In the Field Between Us: Poems, co-written with fellow Rudnitsky-winner Susannah Nevison, is also being published this month. Her “maniacal productivity,” as she calls it, is a topic that percolates throughout her work. That she is publishing these last two books during a pandemic seems strangely fitting.

“Being productive and achieving in really aggressive ways while being asked to stay still has been the unintentional mantra of my life,” Brown says. She is speaking with me from her childhood home near the campus of Sweet Briar College in Virginia, where her parents are professors. “With COVID-19, people are confronting the idea that being in a healthy body is inherently a temporary state,” she says. “But all of my work is deeply concerned with the fragility of the human body and the real danger of exceptionalism. We are always making calls on whose lives are worth saving and how much a life is worth.”  

These ideas are woven throughout the 16 luminous essays in her collection, loosely structured around the year Brown spent in Europe as the Amy Lowell Scholarship for American Poets Traveling Abroad fellow. We move with Brown through her childhood in rural Virginia to the world’s oldest anatomical theater in Bologna, Italy, to grocery stores where strangers ask, “What happened, sweetie? You’re so pretty to be in a wheelchair!”

Primarily a poet, she started writing essays in college. “I’d like to pretend it was out of this generous or political idea,” she says, “but at 19 a lot of what I was doing was writing to keep myself company.” She had little instruction in what her adult life would look like. “It isn’t that people who loved me didn’t want to be helpful, but often you are the only person in your community for whom these are truths,” she says. “There were limits to the ways in which they could keep me company in that experience.”

And so she went looking for company in books and culture. “But it was really hard to find,” Brown explains. There were plenty of narratives about fighting for a cure or facing death but nothing that answered her questions about beauty and sex and desire. “I thought, OK, you are 24 and this is the body you will have forever—altered by surgery, in chronic pain, these complicated disintegrations. I wasn’t finding that material, so I started writing it.”

At the beginning of her fellowship, for which the only requirement is that she not return to America for a year, she worries the gift of this time is wasted on her. In Bologna, she struggles with the city’s ancient cobblestoned streets, a flat tire on her wheelchair, endless searching for ramps, all in a language not her own. Although the book ends in London, she did ultimately return to Bologna.

Brown is glad she made it back even though she knew accessibility in that ancient city would continue to be difficult for her. After eight months abroad, she’d figured out how to live with a level of fear and difficulty she hadn’t previously.

“I think so many of the essays wear that difficulty and anger a little more lightly because they were edited after I returned to Bologna,” she says. “I figured out how to have the experience of my body in a space that didn’t just feel like it was a hundred shut doors.”

Kelly McMasters is the co-editor of This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home and author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town.