Imagine a mother's horror when she finds her 11-month-old daughter suffering on the floor after being shaken by a babysitter. Against the odds, Claire Fishpaw survived and continually amazed her doctors. This book is the story of a mother and father's inspirational quest to provide their daughter with a beautiful life filled with hope. Claire's unforgettable journey is one miracle after another.

"In The Passions of the Voice Claire Kahane argues that the subversion of gender definitions promoted especially by feminism in the late nineteenth century had an unsettling effect on narrative discourse. The emergent figure of the speaking woman, both as narrative trope and as historical agent - personified by the feminist orator - created an anxiety of imagination in Victorian writers. The result is fiction in which the narrative voice loses control of the story it is telling, especially when it evokes the figure of the woman as speaking subject." "Kahane begins with a reading of Freud's "Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria," a text in which Freud develops the concepts of hysterical narrative and of transference by acting out and then analyzing his own hysteria as he unfolds the meanings of the Dora case. Subsequent chapters explore the hysterical voice in Florence Nightingale's Cassandra, Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, Alice James's Diary, Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm, Henry James's The Bostonians, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out, T. S. Eliot's "Hysteria," Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. Kahane argues that each of these texts exhibits features of a discourse in crisis, and that against these textual instabilities the narrative voice struggles to find a form that will contain the confusions of its utterance. She concludes that, for modernist writers such as Conrad and Ford, hysteria was not a psychopathology subject to cure but a sign of the time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

When Claire Bien first began hearing voices, they were infrequent, benign and seemingly just curious about her life and the world around her. But the more attention Claire paid, the more frequently they began to speak, and the darker their intentions became... Despite escalating paranoia, an initial diagnosis of Schizophreniform Disorder and taking medication with debilitating side effects, Claire learned to face her demons and manage her condition without the need for long-term medication. In this gripping memoir, Claire recounts with eloquence her most troubled times. She explains how she managed to regain control over her mind and her life even while intermittently hearing voices, through self-guided and professional therapy and with the support of family and friends. Challenging a purely medical understanding of hearing voices, Claire advocates for an end to the stigma of those who experience auditory verbal hallucinations, and a change of thinking from the professionals who treat the condition.

The liberated 60s have not reached the shores of New Zealand when Claire, a single pregnant girl is sent up-country to have her child, which is to be adopted out. The Sloane family are strangers who offer to board her through this time. But are they? Claire is thrust into the unknown when Alan and Hazel Sloane are involved in a truck accident on the farm. It is up to Claire to help. She does but is now alone on the farm. Initial fears at being alone reach a climax when an elderly man arrives to look after the animals. He is Bob Hodge, Hazel's father. Claire and Bob feed out in the snow and gradually an affinity develops between the pair. In this conservative rural area, the tranquillity of the surface hides a darker background that goes back a generation to before Claire was born. And she is directly involved. This is a story of how scars of the past are opened and conquered by the love of the present for and by Claire, a girl who becomes a woman in the months that make up 1961.