Why "On Muscle" works

One of the multitude of things I enjoyed about our book of the month for May, On Muscle by Bonnie Tsui, was how easy it was to read.

I don’t mean that it’s easy subject matter. There are complex ideas and detailed science in here, there are strong emotions and soul searching. It’s not a physically weighty book, which perhaps helps at a basic level, but it takes real effort to make your writing weightless—to lift itself up and make its deep work fly by. It was such a pleasure to read, in fact, that I was almost surprised when I came to the end of it.

How does that happen? We could look at Bonnie’s word choices, or the way she paints a picture, all of which are interesting and well-worked. But I want to look at the shape, because a big factor in its success is the book’s structure, its skeleton. 

On Muscle is built from a series of short essays, mainly in the 8-12 page range (the shortest is maybe five pages, the longest around 20.) These compact segments build together and sometimes talk to each other, but for the most part they can be read independently. This makes it adaptable to you, the reader: it’s able to accommodate a quick 10-minute blast just as easily as an extended reading session.

The essays are collected together in groups, wrapped around five sections, and each one of those sections takes a different element of what muscles do for us: how we look at them, how they make us both strong and flexible, how they enable us to move and to endure. This gives coherence to the essays, and grants each section a focus, makes them distinct and memorable. 

And inside these braids are the fibers of the book: the facts, the stories, the people. Each part contains a mixture of historical, scientific and personal stories, but most of all the sections are underpinned by a main character who helps tie things together. Among the cast of folks Bonnie brings to us is Jan Todd, the fabled strongwoman who helped break the mold when she started performing amazing feats back in the 1970s. We meet Dan O’Conor, a Chicago man who became famous for jumping into a lake; Ku Stevens, the young Native distance athlete who runs for his forefathers; Matthew Sanford, who is paralyzed from the chest down but has become a champion of adaptive yoga that helps people connect to the bodies that can’t do what they want. 

There are others featured in here, too, and each one feels like a careful, realized portrait. But they are brisk, too, using carefully-chosen details that give us what we need with precision and efficiency. We don’t spend so long with somebody that there’s no room for anyone else; we don’t see characters appearing prominently from one section to the other, confusing the narrative or slowing us down.

The only time people really carry from section to section is with the main characters of this story: Bonnie and her fitness-obsessed artist dad, a man who gave her the love of movement and maybe fueled it even further by leaving her life. They are the glue that keeps the whole book together, Bonnie’s attempt to understand her father and reconnect with him giving the book an intensely personal lens and emotional heart. It’s not that there is some stunning revelation here—by the end of the book he remained something of an enigma—but it felt like an animating spirit that kept the individual elements working together, and made the most out of the way the layers of the book were built.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the structure of On Muscle felt like a superpower: I suppose it’s appropriate for a book that’s all about form. But that careful attention to helping the reader doesn’t happen by accident.

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Let me know what you liked about On Muscle by replying to this email, and don’t forget you have a chance to ask her yourself when we hold our live conversation with Bonnie Tsui on Friday, May 23 at 4pm Eastern/1pm Pacific. Links will come in a future email, but I’d love to see you there.

Onwards

Bobbie