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The poisons come from within and they come from without. Susanne Antonetta's BODY
TOXIC: An Environmental Memoir is a disturbing and haltingly readable book about some
true-life horrors that most of us would prefer not to think about on a regular basis.
Growing up in a polluted New Jersey beach town, Antonetta has suffered the emotional as
well as physical ramifications of poor waste management and weak federal regulation
against such things.
The book has a strange shape to it. Antonetta, with her poet's sensibility, bounces around
between her grandparents' immigrant tales to her self-medication and drug problems as a
wild teen in the '70s to her attempts to overcome the infertility in her later life that
most likely is a result of the summer days she spent swimming in a Jersey Shore town that
was situated next to a Ciba-Geigy plant. The Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant released
more radiation into its neighboring section of New Jersey than Three Mile Island did upon
its breakdown. The larger pattern of health problems stemming from this situation affected
Antonetta's family in many ways --- the hazardous waste that made its way into their
drinking, bathing and recreational swimming waters makes the laundry list of medical
ailments they fell victim to too long even to abridge here. Sometimes it is difficult to
catch the flow of stories from one to another as they might fit into the bigger picture,
but the bigger picture is really just about the tragedy that comes from without when the
environment on which you depend for your survival is wrecked by those who don't care about
consequences.
You don't have to live in New Jersey yourself (although I do, and so the book made me more
than appropriately wary about my family's health and safety in the Garden State) to wonder
how your friends and relatives may have been affected by similar goings-on wherever they
live. Antonetta sounds her siren by holding up the multiple tragedies and problems of her
own life as examples of how the lack of environmental safety has affected her existence.
She is still alive and that, perhaps, is the miracle of this memoir: it is hard to believe
that, with all she did to herself and all that was done to her and her family without
their knowledge, she has managed to survive, with a healthy combination of irony,
fact-finding, and a mere nip of humor. It's not a funny book, BODY TOXIC, but there are
moments where the elemental unforgiving of the horrors almost makes you laugh for joy that
Antonetta's book is not your own story.
This is a strange and disconcerting book, as much for its theme as for its presentation.
The style of the book, the jumping back and forth, will make readers feel as if they are
in the presence of a friend who is in the manic stage of manic depression and has the
energy to keep talking, even if the stories don't jive together. This makes BODY TOXIC
hard to take at first, but eventually you settle into Antonetta's hopping --- by the end
of the book, it all adds up into one tragic horror that you won't soon forget. If you
think our environmental problems in this country are getting better, read this.
--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano
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