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A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain

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A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain

By: Imani Perry
Narrated by: Imani Perry
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About this listen

A groundbreaking new work from National Book Award winner Imani Perry.

Imani Perry’s Audible Original A Dangerously High Threshold for Pain tells the dramatic story of her ongoing struggle with lupus—an autoimmune disease that attacks multiple organ systems—and what we can all learn from those who are grappling with chronic illness. It’s a powerful and poetic story that evokes the works of Susan Sontag, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Audre Lorde.

We follow Perry as her body sends her the first warning signs that something is wrong—“One afternoon something hurt in a way that folded my body in two...the pain felt biblical.” We are then taken on a journey through a medical labyrinth as she seeks solutions to her suffering and struggles to juggle illness, her high-flying career, and her personal life.

This is a story not just about pain, but about hope, as Perry learns to coexist in her body with her disease and finds comfort in sharing her story. As she puts it, “I write to care for myself."

©2022 Imani Perry (P)2023 Audible Originals, LLC.
Biographies & Memoirs Memoir Essentials Motivation & Self-Improvement Personal Success Career Inspiring Self Development Chronic Illness
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About the Creator- Imani Perry

About the Creator and Performer

Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with Gender and Sexuality Studies and Jazz Studies. In the summer of 2023 she will join the faculty at Harvard University as a Radcliffe Professor. Perry is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic. Perry is the author of seven books, most recently South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Ecco Books, 2022), which received the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was an instant New York Times bestseller and an Indie bestseller. South to America was named one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2022, as well as numerous end-of-year best-of lists. Her book Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon Press, 2019) was a finalist for the 2020 Chautauqua Prize and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. She is also the author of  Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Beacon Press, 2018), which received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for outstanding work in literary scholarship, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction and the Shilts-Grahn Award for nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle.  Looking for Lorraine was also named a 2018 notable book by the New York Times, and an honor book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was a finalist for the African American Intellectual History Society Paul Murray Book Prize. Her book  May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), was a winner of the 2019 American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Book Award for the best book in American Studies, the Hurston Wright Award for Nonfiction, and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction. Perry has written for numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, The Progressive, New York Magazine, Harpers and The Paris Review.
She is a scholar of law, literary and cultural studies, and an author of creative nonfiction. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a BA from Yale College in Literature and American Studies. Her writing and scholarship primarily focus on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained. Her book:  Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation (Duke University Press, 2018) is a work of critical theory that describes the formation of modern patriarchy at the dawn of capitalism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the age of conquest, and traces it through to the contemporary hypermedia neoliberal era. Her book  More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (NYU Press, 2011) is an examination of contemporary practices of racial inequality that are sustained and extended through a broad matrix of cultural habits despite formal declarations of racial equality. Her first book, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke Press, 2004) was one of the earliest scholarly examinations of rap music and culture.
Imani Perry recently curated a "Chapter and Verse" playlist for Pandora. Visit it here.

Featured Article: The top 100 memoirs of all time


All genres considered, the memoir is among the most difficult and complex for a writer to pull off. After all, giving voice to your own lived experience and recounting deeply painful or uncomfortable memories in a way that still engages and entertains is a remarkable feat. These autobiographies, often narrated by the authors themselves, shine with raw, unfiltered emotion sure to resonate with any listener. But don't just take our word for it—queue up any one of these listens, and you'll hear exactly what we mean.