If ever there was a body ‘in extremis’, then Smith owns it, and now has written a memoir about it.
She was born with Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI), or brittle bones caused by a collagen defect. As a baby, she had cracked ribs from cuddles. In the 1960s, this was not understood until she was 12 months old, fell out of her highchair and broke her skull.
Her life has been laced with pain. Even as a toddler in the ’60s, when children were not given opioids, she tried to distract herself from pain by singing and swishing her head from side to side.
This book may be harrowing for some readers, as Smith does not hold back in describing the surgical procedures and extreme pain she has had to endure. She has managed to travel widely, even if deeply uncomfortable at times.
She describes her bones as being like the soft lead encased in wooden pencils. She has practised all kinds of Techniques to help deal with it: hypnosis, massage, Alexander technique, Feldenkrais, remedial yoga and acupuncture. With replacement knees and hips, and a whole titanium structure holding her spine in place, Smith bears her scars proudly but the deepest scars are the invisible ones.
Despite her brittle bones, she’s studied, worked, and wrote a biography about Alice Anderson, who established a women-only garage in Melbourne after World War I.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Loretta Smith is a Melbourne-based writer, public speaker and life coach.
Her bestselling biography A Spanner in the Works: The extraordinary story of Alice Anderson and Australia’s first ‘all-girl’ garage 2019) has been optioned for a TV series and inspired the play Garage Girls, performed to a sell-out audience La Mama Theatre in 2023. The play will be touring regionally throughout Victoria in 2024 as part of the VCE playlist. Corpus in Extremis: a Memoir, is her second book.
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