"The Camera My Mother Gave Me" takes us through Susanna Kaysen's often comic, sometimes surreal encounters with all kinds of doctors--internists, gynecologists, "alternative health" experts--as well as with her boyfriend and her friends, when suddenly, inexplicably, "something went wrong" with her vagina.

Spare, frank, and altogether original, "The Camera My Mother Gave Me" challenges us to think in new ways about the centrality and power of sexuality. It is an extraordinary investigation into the role sex plays in perception and our notions of ourselves--and into what happens when the erotic impulse meets the world of medicine.