When Kjersti A. Skomsvold was seventeen years old and about to start engineering studies at college, she found herself almost unable to move. "Laid out like a relic" in a nursing home, she listens to an old woman dying, watches her boyfriend drift away, and makes compendious lists of her worries (that she will have to go speed-dating in a wheelchair, that she will be afraid and in pain for the rest of her life). She also begins to compose a novel on Post-it notes that she sticks on the wall above her bed.

Monsterhuman is an autofictional tour de force--a funny, sad,...