Anna Penenberg has created a mother-daughter memoir that evokes chills, sadness, frustration and relief.

At the age of 16, Penenberg’s daughter, Dana, suddenly begins showing bizarre physical symptoms, including a fever, fatigue, headaches and a sense of being under attack by the world around her, as though something were assaulting her senses. She is by turns irrationally angry and pitifully childlike and helpless. Her body becomes swollen in odd places at different times. Dana must quit school, and she and her mother begin a several-year odyssey to seek a cure.

"This story will be read with serious intent by anyone who has experienced even a small portion of the pair’s long and strained yet close-knit bonding."

Initially diagnosed with Lyme disease, perhaps from a tick bite, Dana responds to standard remedies for that ailment --- mainly antibiotics --- but only for a while. Time after time, new healing methods are tried, from magnetism to sleeping in a coffin-shaped box, to having blood taken out and then put back in her body at a Mexican beauty salon. Dana improves at times, and then becomes so sensitive to any stimuli that a random smell can make her scream.  She sometimes feels as though her head is bursting and that she can barely breathe. Through an arduous, often terrifying search for any sort of long-term healing, traveling across the country in sometimes enjoyable interludes, they finally settle on a regimen of raw and natural foods combined with energy techniques. By the time she is 21, Dana is able to live on her own.

Penenberg describes Dana’s suffering and her own anxieties and setbacks in a gentle, almost understated manner, perhaps owing to the unconventional nature of her upbringing and character. She is a dance therapist, using techniques learned from dance masters as well as from Eastern, yogic and energy-gathering sources. Prayer played a role in her long journey with Dana, while their openness to supernatural phenomena and the gifts of ancient and foreign cultures also underpinned their relentless determination to save Dana’s life.

Penenberg admits that one painful aspect of those years with Dana was that she could not be physically close to her, owing to the distressing nature of her symptoms. This resulted in her feeling a lack of closeness, of physical comfort, which is something she had to overcome when in her 60s she was finally relieved of caring directly for Dana. A most remarkable closure to her memoir comes with her amazing reunion with a book --- her childhood diary.

Anna Penenberg describes her coping technique throughout this period as “normalizing the abnormal.” DANCING IN THE NARROWS provides a close-up look at the fears and hopes of a parent desperate to save her child, who is clinging to life despite its pains. This story will be read with serious intent by anyone who has experienced even a small portion of the pair’s long and strained yet close-knit bonding.