Trouble In Mind: Poisonous Roots

Icy Sparks Gwyn Hyman Rubio New York: Penguin Books; 2001, 336 pages. $13.95, ISBN: 0142000205

There is a side of disease that is difficult for science and medicine to reach: the part that is elaborated within the patient’s own mind. Although we can describe the chaotic neural circuitry of neurological disease in detached terms, how are we to imagine the very real mental and physical experience of a seizure or tic, or to see our very familiar world through the dimly colored lens of an afflicted individual. Rubio’s story of a little girl with Tourette syndrome helps us paint that picture.

Icy Sparks begins in the summer of the title character’s tenth birthday when she first develops the motor and verbal tics associated with Tourette Syndrome. During the following school year, her tics prove to be unacceptable classroom disruptions, landing her in a sort of solitary confinement and eventually, Bluegrass State Hospital. At the hospital, Icy lives with a group of children with many disorders and undergoes evaluation from a state doctor who hopes to “fix” her. Although she isn’t exactly fixed when she leaves the hospital, she appears to be more comfortable with her “good parts” and her “bad parts,” and she returns home to her grandparents’ farm. She receives the rest of her education through home-schooling from her exceedingly overweight but benevolent and intelligent friend, Miss Emily, from whom Icy learns both good and bad lessons about being an outcast. Icy wades through most of the mire of her pre-teen and teenage years in a microcosm with only her grandparents and Miss Emily to talk to, except for a brief but hopeful love affair that, like most other things in her life, is eventually ruined by her disorder.

Rubio, a childhood epileptic, takes pains to simultaneously narrate the story and implant the reader in Icy’s mind, drawing the marked distinction between a symptomatic description of Tourette Syndrome and what Icy actually feels is going on inside her body. When Icy finds herself in the middle of one of her tics, her eyes protrude like “frog eyes” and her limbs jerk violently out of place. She feels the urges as gentle sensations at first, before they take over, but try as she might, she can’t keep the tiny twitches from exploding ferociously in her arms and legs. Accompanying the motor tics is the emphatic repetition of phrases that Icy wants to keep to herself but cannot, like when she repeats, “Big belly…Great big belly!” as she struggles to keep a delicate secret from her grandparents. However, the phrases turn from suppressed thoughts to the characteristic obscene verbal attacks when her tics erupt in anger. Interestingly, the villains, such as the malicious hospital aide, are drawn so sinisterly and Icy’s emotions described so compassionately that one almost believes her intense reactions are perfectly normal. Whereas the motor and verbal tics seem completely out of Icy’s control, Icy learns quickly how to manipulate one particular symptom––loud, froglike croaking sounds–– to her advantage, effectively repelling a would-be playground assailant. After her episodes, Icy is physically drained, and sometimes collapses into the arms of the closest loved one, a tender analogy for the emotional drain of being isolated from her peers and her community. She retreats into the security of her grandparents’ home deep in the mountains.

Icy Sparks, aptly named, is strong-willed, but she is also is a compelling victim as she takes us with her through tortuous cycles of hope and hopelessness. For example, a Christmas pageant finds Icy poised to steal the show, but she ends up the butt of a cruel joke. Instead of foreshadowing the outcome, Rubio deceptively builds the possibility for Icy’s triumph to fever pitch before dramatically cutting her dreams from beneath her, leaving Icy and the reader broken and empty and even more convinced that Tourette Syndrome will have the best of Icy.

Icy’s futile struggle to control her disorder is a recurring theme, and her doctor at Bluegrass State Hospital even tries to convince her that avoiding a full-blown tic is as simple as substituting a flutter of the fingertips in exchange for a violent kick or thrust. One of Icy’s desperate attempts at restraint helps illustrate another common symptom of the syndrome and related disorders: the obsessive need to arrange. Rubio shows us that the meticulous maintenance of her environment is Icy’s way to eliminate disorder in her surroundings and thus eliminate the disorder in her mind. Unfortunately, Icy’s method of arranging based on color is revealed as peculiar and illogical, and when her principal points this out and attempts to correct it, one of the most violent outbursts in the book ensues. There is a fulfilling resolution to Icy’s control issues, however, taken from Rubio’s inspiration for Icy’s disorder, in which Icy discovers her own special talent, and in it, the power to heal herself.

The story of Icy Sparks is as much about a little girl with a problem as it is about the problem of the people around her: their inability to separate her poisonous roots and berries from her useful leaves and stems, like the pokeweed her grandfather enjoys. The author chose 1950s Appalachia as a backdrop of intolerance to magnify Icy’s difficulties and to draw on the irony of a people––isolated and often shunned by others––who find it difficult to accept one of their own who is different. The notion of acceptance vacillates between poignant and preachy, especially toward the end of the book when Icy, her grandmother, and Miss Emily finally find a place of belonging in one of the local church congregations. Nonetheless, Icy Sparks would have been a much less interesting book if set just a few decades later, owing to advances in scientific understanding and public awareness of Tourette Syndrome, and in its chosen setting, casts an informed, yet moving perspective on a still largely mysterious disease.

Author Gwyn Hyman Rubio has also written The Woodman’s Daughter.

• © American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Theraputics 2006