South Africa: Speechless at 40 – Kim Ballantine’s raw and darkly funny memoir

Within days Ballantine was reduced to making strange, animalistic noises, uncontrollable laryngeal spasms, and communicating with her family in rudimentary sign language. Bewildered and fearful, she consulted a specialist. She was in for a shock.

The diagnosis was spasmodic dysphonia, a rare condition in which, essentially, the body’s vocal chords do not respond to messages from the brain in a normal manner. There was no known cure and no fully understood cause. The coldly clinical…