In Nina Lichtenstein’s new memoir, Body: My Life in Parts, flesh and bones become an unusual gateway to contemplations of youth, middle age and menopause. Each chapter is named after a physical attribute and explores her emotional and spiritual
connections to memories around different body parts, including eyes, nose, skin and breasts.

The author was born in Oslo and came to the United States as an au pair in 1988, at the age of 19. It was an exhilarating time for Lichtenstein, who would eventually meet the man who became her first husband and the father of her children. He was Jewish, she was not. But she soon fell in love with Judaism, converting before she married him.

In the first chapter, titled “Eyes,” Lichtenstein writes that she was told in middle school that she resembled the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann. Around that time, Lichtenstein was diagnosed as farsighted and chose aviator glasses in tortoiseshell frames. She could finally see the blackboard, but something deeper occurred.

“I imagined myself more bookish than I was…. I didn’t have any concept of what an intellectual was, or that there was even such a thing,” she writes, “but a palpable sensation of wisdom came over me when the plastic frames rested on my nose.”

In another chapter, “Skin,” Lichtenstein extols the history that her skin carries, including her post-pregnancy stretch marks that summon poetry. “In their unison, these raised and dipping impressions on the skin of my belly will forever remind me of a sweeping time in my life, where not only my skin was stretched but my whole person as well.”

And about creating her Jewish family, she writes that with “my newly minted Jewish identity, I have literal skin in the game.”

Having given birth to three sons in four years and breastfeeding those babies one after the other, Lichtenstein portrays her breasts as utilitarian and defining. Of nourishing her “Viking boychiks,” she writes, “the intimacy during nursing is like no other inter-human experience I’ve ever lived, our faces fewer than twelve inches apart, our senses hyper-focused on one another.”

Lichtenstein has kept a strictly kosher diet since she converted to Judaism more than 30 years ago. Her years of following Orthodox laws of mikveh and marital purity are detailed in “Vagina.” But she keeps her Norwegian roots close even as she revels in Jewish practice. For a time, she wrote a blog called “The Viking Jewess,” celebrating her “culturally blended” extended family.

Just as the parts of the body work in tandem in this memoir, so do the diverse cultures that immeasurably add to Lichtenstein’s full life. Body: My Life in Parts celebrates the way physical, emotional and spiritual components beautifully come together in a life.

Judy Bolton-Fasman is the author of Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets.