SHAKY PLACES

Turner’s memoir chronicles his battle with Parkinson’s disease.

The author was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s disease in 2019. The diagnosis was particularly difficult news as Turner, whose sketches appear at the beginning of each chapter, is an artist. (As he puts it, “my fingers wouldn’t obey my brain.”) Hope lay in a procedure called deep brain stimulation, a treatment that involves electrodes being placed inside a patient’s brain along with a “titanium-encased device” under the clavicle that transmits electrical pulses. DBS is only a part of the story—the author digs deeply into his personal history throughout the book to give a full picture of his life. He grew up in El Dorado County in Northern California and was a Dodge Charger-driving troubled teen in the 1980s; at one point, his father nearly kicked him out of the house. As an adult, he went through two divorces and worked for decades in the printing industry. Turner has thoughts to share on everything from transhumanism to the ways in which a memoir is not unlike a road trip. The book makes for a ramble of a journey, with the author admitting that, “As a memoir, Shaky Places strays into the weeds a lot” (various topics come and go as the chapters progress). The work is at its best when Turner gets into unexpected details, like when he describes how Bluetooth connectivity allows the DBS apparatus to work. His meandering prose style can lead to lengthy sentences that don’t reveal all that much; discussing an episode of irresponsibility, the author writes, “I found ignorance entirely insufficient to justify my behavior however many times I would resort to that pitiful plea during the year that followed.” Still, by the end of the book, the reader has learned a lot and put a human face on a well-known though poorly understood disease.

An honest and informative, if winding, depiction of struggles with life and illness.