The title comes from the surreal, taboo-shattering vision of Luis Bunuel's film "Viridiana": A band of beggars is eating a Last Supper-like feast in a rich man's house. When a woman among them is asked to take a group snapshot, she lifts up her skirt and uses the "camera" that's underneath...

In short, candid, and wryly perceptive chapters, Kaysen takes us through the encounters she had with her doctors, her boyfriend, and her friends when suddenly, for no apparent reason, "something went wrong" with her vagina.

Just as Girl, Interrupted explored "the borders between the world inside the mental hospital and the world outside, between sanity and insanity, freedom and captivity, self and other, dignity and shame, power and powerlessness" (Boston Phoenix), here Kaysen uses a particular clinical experience for larger purposes. She provokes us to think in altogether new ways about the centrality, power -- and terror -- of sexuality.

An extraordinarily original investigation of what happens when the landscape of desire meets the world of medicine.