Darcey Steinke’s This Is the Door: Notes from a Body in Pain is a profound and searching examination of pain, moving organ by organ through the body (spine, knees, skin) while weaving together personal experience with literature, art, and medicine. From surgery to pilgrimage, from Frida Kahlo’s pain diaries to encounters with physicians, Steinke asks: what does pain do to us, and what might it make possible? She is joined by Octavia Bright, whose memoir This Ragged Grace charts a different but equally visceral journey, through addiction, recovery, and renewa.