A dazzling debut novel about a young woman’s difficult coming of age in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia, grappling under the weight of Muslim patriarchal norms and a debilitating neurological condition. The mysterious affliction leaves her unable to control her muscles, plagued by pain and speech disorders, defying diagnosis.

Addressing each body part with the scrupulousness of a medical researcher, the narrator explores memories, traditions, and taboos related to her physical self. In the process, a woman once destined for the role of a beautiful marriageable daughter comes to be perceived as damaged goods.

With verbal elegance and poetic power, Egana Djabbarova unveils a hidden world in which illness unexpectedly facilitates her liberation. Her book stands in the proud tradition of confessional feminist writers like Sandra Cisneros, Arundhati Roy, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Egana Djabbarova, born in 1992 into an Azerbaijani family in Yekaterinburg, Russia, is a poet, essayist, and scholar. She is the author of several collections of poetry. Having been forced to flee Russia in 2024 because of her LGBTQ activism and opposition to the war in Ukraine, she lives in Hamburg, Germany.

“An exquisite Bildungsroman by an exceptional author reading her own body as the bearer of inherited stigmas, offering a thought-provoking journey into what it’s like to grow up as a stranger.” Sergei Lebedev

“Egana Djabbarova’s wild fever dream of a novel lays bare a world where female utterance is seismic, its eruption a shock of radicalizing violence. In prose marked by intimacy, restraint, and terror, My Dreadful Body introduces a writer of astounding intelligence and power.” Honor Moore

"In her debut novel, Egana Djabbarova tells the story of a young woman whose neurological disorder makes her life in a strict Muslim Azerbaijani community in Russia even more challenging, but also brings unexpected liberation." Ms Magazine

"The novel connects the pains of chronic illness to the impossible standards that our societies set for women’s bodies. The novel promises relief for the narrator through reflection and understanding, and I expect it will do the same for any reader who has ever felt, due to internal or external pressures, that their body is failing them." Words Without Borders

"A woman maps cultural expectations and desires onto her ailing body in Egana Djabbarova’s singular novel My Dreadful Body . . . The book blooms . . . Russian and Azerbaijani words infuse the translation with further vibrancy . . . An incisive novel, My Dreadful Body celebrates women’s agency, mourns physical losses, and rebels about inherited boundaries." Foreword Reviews (Starred Review)

I I I 

H A I R

My mother always wanted to have a son—then again, all the women in our family always wanted to have sons. Of course, their daughters brought them happiness, but daughters were merely temporary inhabitants of the home and were nurtured for other families, for their future husbands’ families. The main thing any little girl should do was marry and leave the parental home to the sounds of “Vagzaly.”3 A daughter unable to make her parents happy with her marriage was considered a bad daughter. 

3 Вагзалы (“Vagzly” if transliterated to English) is the Russian transliteration of the Azerbaijani Vağzalı. It is the title of a song traditionally played when seeing a bride off from her father’s home. It is also a folk dance for weddings. The title translates to “train station” since, in the past, a bride often left her parents’ home for the groom’s home by train.

My mother wanted a son, but her hair began falling out after he was finally born. A small bald spot, initially almost unnoticeable and easy to cover by combing over, expanded with time, destroying all of my mother’s beautiful thick black hair. It fell out in clumps, then grew back as strange and curly gray hair that also quickly fell out. It was odd to see this new, unfamiliar mother—a tired woman attempting in vain to save her remaining strands of hair—because she wasn’t the same mother who had beautiful long black hair in childhood photos. Mama frantically collected all the hair-growth home remedies on the Internet, rubbed mixtures of onion and garlic and castor oil onto her scalp, went for painful injections, and took vitamins, but nothing helped. Her hair was gone, taking her youth, her beauty, and her past along with it. Instead of remedies, shampoos, and creams for hair loss, she now had a multitude of headscarves as well as a genuine wig that she could barely wear, complaining that her head itched and sweated underneath. It’s possible her hair was the price paid for her long-awaited healthy son, a late and beloved little boy with puffy lips and long lashes. Though she was sad to lose the black hair that preserved the memory of all the worthy women of the family line—each of whom, of course, had long hair—the little boy she had wished for over the years was some consolation. 

Back when we were children, my sister and I knew that any self-respecting little girl should have long, long hair that makes it easy to hide the contours of maturing and chang- ing bodies, hair whose length conveyed its wearer’s patience and humility. Long hair also differentiated girls from boys, which is why as a schoolgirl I had very long hair, below my waist, and usually plaited it into a fat braid instead of wearing it loose. Of course hardly anyone admired my long hair: it wasn’t exciting and it was just bothersome for me since it was impossible to deal with if I didn’t braid it or gather it up in a high bun. That was why I soon had another dream: cutting my hair. I secretly looked at pictures of short haircuts in magazines, saving photos of actresses I liked and attempting to imagine which haircut would flatter me most. I needed my father’s permission to cut my hair, but of course he was against it.

The day did come, though, when I went off to a hair salon and had my hair cut to shoulder length without asking anyone. That was also the day I finally left the hospital. It was a nice March day, albeit slippery outside, so I stepped carefully, leaning on my cane. After being released, I went to fulfill a promise I’d made to myself: I would cut my hair when I was able to speak again.