Someone on one of the readers’ pages I frequent on Facebook posted something recently about only wanting to read nonfiction because she “likes to learn while I read.” And it made me think about the fact that I never read nonfiction (since I left school, I can count the number of nonfiction books I have read on two hands), but that I learn many things, nonetheless, from my reading.

One example that I use when people raise an eyebrow in disbelief: A few years ago, one of my friends told me she was suffering greatly from Ménière’s disease, which is “a disorder of the inner ear that can cause vertigo (spinning sensation), tinnitus (ringing or buzzing in the ear), hearing loss, and a feeling of fulness or pressure in the affected ear. It is a chronic condition, meaning it’s long-lasting and can have recurrent episodes of symptoms.” She told me there was no sure-fire treatment and that she simply had to live with it, but that it meant multiple days of lying immobile waiting for the symptoms to go away.

I immediately remembered a scene in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer. There is a character in that book, a woman who has a little girl who suffers from extreme vertigo, called BPPV. BPPV is “Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo.” It is a common cause of “a feeling of spinning or dizziness. It’s triggered by changes in head position, especially when rolling over in bed, getting out of bed, or tilting the head. BPPV is caused by loose crystals in the inner ear that move into the wrong part of the balance system.” When the wave of dizziness hits, the book describes how the woman lays the little girl down with her head hanging over the edge of her bed (or, if they are out in public, over her mother’s arm), and then has her do a slow, timed series of movements that alleviate the condition. The action is called the Epley Maneuver. Loose crystals (called otoliths) have become displaced into the posterior canal of the inner ear, which makes the brain think that fluid is moving due to a head turn when it is, in fact, caused by the crystals. Since the fluid is moving even though the head is stationary, it brings on extreme dizziness. The Epley Maneuver attempts to reroute the crystals, moving them out of the canal so that the cause of the dizziness goes away. (Here is a YouTube video that explains the maneuver—if you search it on YouTube, you will find multiple demonstrations. https://youtu.be/o4GV-EbnMfI?si=1lzrDemwCgLayCR-)

In the book, the woman has a neighbor, a curmudgeonly old man with whom she has been feuding over various things for many years. But when he himself has an onset of BPPV, she kindly teaches him the Epley Maneuver.

When my friend told me about her distress and how severely this condition was impacting her day-to-day living, I remembered the scene from Prodigal Summer and shared the technique with her. She tried it and, after repeating it a few times over the next 24 hours, her BPPV subsided. From then on, when she felt it coming on, she would use the maneuver to avoid the onset of the attack.

It should be noted that if you google Ménière’s disease, it will tell you that treatments include diuretics (bad for you) and surgery, and that it’s incurable. I would never have discovered the Epley Maneuver if it hadn’t been for this novel by Kingsolver.

I reflected on this today when I was coming to the end of The Grey Wolf, the latest Armand Gamache mystery by Louise Penny. Armand muses on a quote he heard somewhere that, for me, perfectly epitomized the world we here in the States are living through under our current insane and oligarchic regime. It said,

Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

It went on to note that there was plenty of malice to go around (yes, there is!), but that it was far outweighed by sheer stupidity. I am constantly reminding myself of this as political events unfold around us, and trying to hold onto the hope that the readers among us will prevail and both malice and stupidity will eventually subside.