"Skin: A Case Study" by Valk Fisher
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
Image: skin (see ‘Connective Tissue’)
Skin: A Case Study
OBJECTIVES
Identify and understand:
● principal layers and functions
● histories of inflammatory response
● factors contributing to healthy scarring
● role in homeostasis, recordkeeping
This is a case I hesitate to make. Its illustrative value is unclear.
My study’s limitations came to light like this:
It was a small group sitting outside around a candle.
It had been a long time since I’d been around people. Earlier that night, it had rained, but we sat beneath a covered roof that opened onto the garden of the makeshift home my partner and I had inhabited since we’d last seen people. The makeshift home was far from what felt like our real home, in a forty-minute drive up a mountain where few people had reason to go. It had been a good place for when we were not seeing people, with a mountain face onto the Atlantic and a view of distant carrier ships and occasional sail boats.
Seated around the table, we mostly knew each other but spoke carefully, as if unsure we could still cross paths.
Someone asked what I was writing, and I told of my work on an essay about entrapment in skin.
My friend had brought to dinner that evening his new girlfriend, who had recently moved to Lisbon from South Africa. I could not wait to get out, she had said of a Cape Town still defined by apartheid.
That, I said as I explained my essay. I was interested in that very human need to escape our own confines in skin.
Do you know what I mean? I asked this reflexively, because I was confident that everyone did.
The group fell silent. This lasted long enough to take notice.
Around the table eventually came iterations of no, not at all, I can’t say that I do.
There being six humans seated around the tealight, this was surely a matter of clarification. I considered what I knew of the bodies around me. The South African woman had recently begun lasering off her many tattoos, arriving at dinner straight from an appointment. Also present: two former semi-professional athletes, a man with multiple sclerosis, one who had balded young and then resurfaced his scalp with hair transplants, a woman so thin the proportions seemed unsustainable. Surely there was something these people knew of that relentless enclosure I was writing of.
You know, this sense that the skin you’re in has too firm a grip, I said. The more I explained, the more my voice took on the tenor of a distress signal.
I was suddenly aware of my contours, of how very different I was from the bodies around me.
That sounds really interesting, the tattooed woman said.
My signal had gone unnoticed.
For the first time it occurred to me the entrapment was not universal. Was it possible I was writing on an unrelatable premise?
You know, this sense that the skin you’re in has too firm a grip, I said. The more I explained, the more my voice took on the tenor of a distress signal.
Despite the silence around the table, I understood myself to be in some form of entrapped company. On my desk was Roxane Gay on her caging in an “unruly body;” Leslie Jamison on a “wrongness in” her “being;” Rachel Cusk on “imprison[ment] in a block of stone from which” freeing herself became “both a necessity and an obligation.” What to make of a commonality of entrapment that existed only on paper? Around the table from me sat real people, none of whom could speak to captivity in skin.
It appeared I would not be writing a grand essay on the human experience. I found myself more alone than accompanied in entrapment.
I reminded myself: there had been a pandemic. I had had a child. I had moved to a mountaintop. I found myself finally in the presence of people and already tired of them. I was trapped and also alone.
One might argue this sense of singularity is what skin delivers best. Without the border, where to delimit the individual life? To medicine, skin is a first line of defense. In jurisprudence, skin contours the legal person. Bodies had, for a year, stood six feet apart in public health measures that recognized this sense of separateness. Like borders on a map, skin draws spatial clarity.
Does this make the other unknowable? “You never really understand a person,” writes Harper Lee, until you “climb into” their skin “and walk around in it.” I considered the bodies around me. What could I really know of their stories?
In my head I began abandoning my half-drafted essay.
From across the table, a former tennis player spoke. He had once sought the professional circuit. After years of roadside hotel stays for matches that ended in losses and flights home exceeding any prize money he made, he quit tennis and took a desk job with Microsoft. He gained 60 pounds. He spent the subsequent decade losing them. I think I understand, he said, his voice a distant ship.
Without the skin boundary, could there be this sense of solitude? Skin marks the space between body and world.
I once took a road trip from Santiago east across the Andes through a mountain-pass tunnel, halfway through which I had, unknowingly, left Chile and entered Argentina. There had been no visible sign for the border. On the other side of El Paso Internacional Los Libertadores, the Andes wore the same shade of burnt earth and rose that draped the Chilean slopes.
“What happens when I imagine that my body is a place?” Aracelis Girmay asks in her poetry. “What does it remember? What does it say? What silence does it keep?” I think of the tennis player and how far away he sounded.
“We cannot of course know place,” write Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker in a collaborative project that makes art by neither illustrating nor describing landscape, but by walking through it.
I had crossed the Andean border by car at the behest of my great aunt. To Aida, the best way to really know a place is to move through it, and so she once walked the streets of San Francisco, Paris, Philadelphia, committing city maps to memory. I emphasize the knowing, because to experientially know – conocer – is different than to intellectually know – saber. Aida drove me through the scaffold of a country that’s part of what I call home. I had never made this journey. In driving through the slopes that I’d only known as backdrop, I knew this home differently.
Still circled around the tealight, I considered the merits of the unrelatable essay. If we were each alone in the place of skin, if this place was fundamentally unknowable even to its inhabitant, there was simply nothing of which to write.
There were only confines.
I wanted, very much, to abandon the essay.
I had aspired to insights on the caging, to the commonality of identification that Karl Ove Knausgård suggests drives story, when there was simply no experience shared. My dinner conversation showed my subject to not only be unrelatable, but also irrelevant.
I abandoned the essay, almost.
But to be a scholar of art, Maggie Nelson points out, “is to be interested in what art has to tell us over time which is different from what we might want,” and so I could not abandon my essay. It became a case study in limits of body and craft, written in the hopes one story might something illustrate.
If we were each alone in the place of skin, if this place was fundamentally unknowable even to its inhabitant, there was simply nothing of which to write.
Case Study, 1.1: Case History. Woman considers hiring a surgeon to cut a flap in skin, wondering if she’ll find a better form of herself. The thought sits for a decade.
While land has no beginning, one might consider skin as the place where it all starts. Before a mother has reason to suspect the cells multiplying in utero, her embryo is already covered in it. Skin is the thing that carries, there before even the beating heart.
In early fetushood, skin is translucent, offering sight of venous constellations beneath. Skin grows thick in gestation, becoming, by the time of birth, dense webbing.
From its precipitous form unravels a story.
Narrative arcs manifest almost as early as skin does.
A friend who is pregnant tells me: her daughter would be born with a split in her upper lip. “But these babies,” she said, meaning those born with a cleft, “end up doing okay!” Skin in utero gathers the unborn child within a notion of collective and singular identity, launching a story unpacked in its living.
Skin stories are, as my dinner party conversation impressed, singular. Its outcomes present themselves unequally. This is perhaps most clearly seen in discrimination based on notions of race. “Before they even bring a new life into this world,” Serena Williams writes of black expectant mothers in America, “the cards are already stacked against them.”
Skin outcomes are neither chosen nor equitable.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
Over dinner, the recently transplanted South African woman told of her ongoing tattoo removal. The grey designs inside her bicep and down her forearm might have been seen as beautiful. But it was not about the tattoos, she explained of their undoing. I was nineteen. She was lasering off stories behind the ink.
One might see skin as a place of confinement. How to make of the enforced place a dwelling? Claudia Rankine reflects on bodily manifestations of self-expression in Just Us, wondering if physical interventions are “how we free ourselves in order to free ourselves from confronting history in all time.” While she writes of black women bleaching their hair, her reflections on agency in appearance translate to manipulations of skin. If skin is the place in which it all starts, and if this place is a permanent residence, there seems a compulsion to make it our own.
My new friend feared some tattoos would never undo. Full removal might not be possible, her dermatologist had explained.
Skin is a space subject to its inhabitant’s ongoing redrafting; we mostly aim to ensure the outside matches a sensibility within. And at four weeks’ gestation, an opening storyline has already been written.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
On that rainy evening with friends, an English man, whose work lived in the stock markets, wanted to know more about my entrapment.
Have you always felt this way? He looked concerned. He drank more wine.
Skin, to the newborn child, is earliest comfort. Bare newborn skin on her mother’s will regulate temperature and blood sugar, even establish attachment through smell. If skin is the first thing that holds in utero, it is also first sustenance on the other side of it.
When had skin gone from being cradle to cage?
Could I trace the strand?
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
While Chile had never been my actual residence, it was a place I perceived as mine, and I, despite technically ‘being’ from elsewhere, wanted to belong to it. When my family landed in Santiago from wherever else we were living, at the airport we’d meet Aida, usually fresh from a hairdresser appointment. Together we’d drive south, down a path I’d committed to memory, to a small town in Santiago’s outskirts, where her younger sister Eloisa lived. I remember my grandparents’ house mostly for their blue pickup truck and the trellis of grapes beneath which it was parked, near which my grandmother and Aida would find shade in which to knit and bicker, taking up threads of arguments that spooled back into childhood.
There was a town square in which one could frequent a church, a bakery, and a pharmacy, in this order of importance. On one such outing with my father, we bought popsicles from a street vendor and ate them on a bench near the church. Across from us were long-haired women dancing at the opposite end of the plaza. Gold coins jangled from their clothing as they moved, waving the floor-length fabric of bright skirts as they twirled. The garments gained flight. A twirl to the right happened as a skirt sashayed left. The layers moved out of pace with the dancers, as if the skirts were skins wearing their women.
Bare newborn skin on her mother’s will regulate temperature and blood sugar, even establish attachment through smell. If skin is the first thing that holds in utero, it is also first sustenance on the other side of it.
My father took me to see these women. One of them wanted to read my lines. She held my hand in hers and turned it towards the sky. She studied my skin as if deciphering a script written in code accessible only to her.
I would have four children, she said, looking into the eyes of a child. Her tone was ominous. The message did not sound promising.
I hadn’t signed up for this. And as matters of disenfranchisement often go, I hadn’t signed up at all, but rather, been volunteered. In this conscription, I’d lost jurisdiction of my own lines. It was as if my skin told the reader something in equal parts inevitable and inaccessible to me about my future choices or lack thereof. This something was already written.
Space, writes Gaston Bachelard, “contains compressed time,” suggesting a matter of inevitability in what from it unfolds. Did the lines on my skin speak to an inevitable arc?
I pulled my hand back and retreated. I like to imagine my hands in fists. It was the feeling of being caught in skirts that wore their women.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
Outside over dinner the wind carried rain beneath our cover, but we were entrenched in a skin story. We stayed in its sound, what Reynolds Price described as the “dominant sound of our lives.”
What is this compulsion towards narrative?
I asked this of my therapist in a Zoom session during which I found myself discussing divorce. I had somehow become the default parental caregiver during a lockdown. I told her of the story in my head: I was a Feminist; this would never happen to me. My therapist mentioned narrative psychology; how were the stories I told myself helping me cope?
In the wake of the pandemic’s first year, psychotherapist Esther Perel released a card game for undersocialized humans. The game relies on prompts to elicit storytelling, which Perel sees as foundational in human relationships.
But there is a difference between sharing a story and writing the narrative.
Reflecting on Perel’s game, I considered my essay on skin. What is the relationship between narrative and truth? Is there one?
I return to the original case study.
Case Study, 1.2: History. Within two weeks of birth, infant is taken to a jewelry store, where noises are loud and lights are bright, for a needle to puncture her lobes. In theory she would not remember.
Case Study, 1.3: History. Toddler trips over a long-hanging dress that is useless for climbing. She falls from a tree, skinning a knee.
Case Study, 1.4: History. Child too small to see above the bathroom sink loves looking at her mother’s reflection in the mirror above. Mother applies cream to face, so I don’t get wrinkles! What is a wrinkle? Six-year-old mimics, spreading hands across her cheeks, hoping to be as beautiful.
Case Study, 1.5: Case Presentation. Skin stories mount from an early age.
As I go on here about my entrapped condition, I can see I’m writing into an arc. The “romance of narrative is so hard to resist,” writes Eula Biss.
In this conscription, I’d lost jurisdiction of my own lines. It was as if my skin told the reader something in equal parts inevitable and inaccessible to me about my future choices or lack thereof. This something was already written.
Case Study, 1.6: Aggravating factor. 18-year-old female admitted to emergency room reporting 7/10 on pain scale. Blood sugar "high" out of range at 579 at 12:30 today. Pt states for past 2 weeks having very dry mouth, very thirsty “can't get enough to drink, and peeing a lot”. Pt states she has had a decreased appetite. States she vomited after trying to eat. Other: dehydration, weight loss, skin chafe. Pt unconscious. Saline-lock inserted. IV fluids initiated. Pt transported to inpatient designation via stretcher.
Case Study, 1.7: Notes on trauma. Woman wakes up to a diagnosis. It is juvenile diabetes, which means nothing to her. She does not recognize herself.
Case Study, 1.8: Notes, shift nurse: Woman showers on her third inpatient day. This is complicated by her tether to intravenous fluid. It’s removed as she learns to push needles through subcutaneous fat.
Case Study, 1.9: Notes, diagnosing Resident. Patient asked if “things will be normal by Christmas.”
Case Study, 1.10: Notes on an education. Woman is given guidelines:
1. Don’t smoke
2. Pay attention to your feet; avoid being barefoot
3. Avoid injuries, all cuts, all unnecessary surgeries
4. Drink alcohol responsibly
5. Take stress seriously
6. Consider whether you should be eating that
7. Do not leave the house without backup insulin
8. But keep the backup refrigerated
9. Reconsider traveling
10. Get active! But exercise with caution
and so on.
She is discharged.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
In the year after my diagnosis, I had a series of dreams in which I scratched my skin off.
I would awake to disappointment that skin as I knew it was, of course, still there. My fingertips grew callouses like thickening bark. My belly bruised blue from its puncturing. My skin could not be scratched off.
Instead, it indexed a mounting catalogue.
If skin chronicles a life, it will render the trauma of living. Gay writes her past of sexual abuse; in “wilful” eating to cope, she reached 577 pounds to “keep men away,” weight she’s at times lost. But neither expansion nor contraction in skin undoes the assault, for she still “imagine[s] all the ways [she] could be hurt.” The skin cannot unsee. Its narrative strands cannot be erased, existing, rather, as knots in fabric or signs embroidered in stars.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
A friend left by my hospital bedside a CD labelled Get Well Soon Mix in bright green, which became the soundtrack to a new life. It opened with The Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ followed by Fiona Apple’s ‘Save Me,’ but it was Nina Simone who voiced what I could not, singing of a longing to be free.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
Needles and tubing for insulin infusions suddenly hung from unnatural places; I still tangle in them as they snag on door handles and my toddler’s hands, ripping into my skin in small accidents. But if I felt imprisoned, it was not by the visible paraphernalia of chronic illness. My skin had new meaning: suddenly, everyone had a diabetic relative, perhaps with an amputated foot. Everyone had watched Julia Roberts die of complications from diabetes after giving birth in Steel Magnolias. Skin held me in an arc that was unrecognizable as mine.
“We’re all stuck in our bodies,” writes Olivia Laing in Everybody, “meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do.”
It might be said, then, that freedom in skin is choice to map meaning from a place of possibility rather than limitation, to roam in body as a place of intuition rather than prescription, to commit the immutable inner self to memory: skin accumulates stories from living, but freedom is in Aida’s conocer, where place is an interior landscape distinct from the physical manifestations of lived skin.
“Sometimes we’re all trying to purge something,” writes Jamison in reference to those “demons” that “belong to all of us: an obsession with our boundaries and visible shapes” that relates not to body, but rather, to a feeling of being “perpetually misunderstood,” most painfully, by ourselves.
The skin cannot unsee. Its narrative strands cannot be erased, existing, rather, as knots in fabric or signs embroidered in stars.
Case Study, 1.11: Notes on a mindset. Woman is told that extreme exercise can challenge glucose management, so she runs the New York Marathon. Then Paris, then London. Woman jumps out of an airplane, just to see what happens in freefall. Woman takes liberal shots of tequila with friends and tries recreational drugs. This all leaves her hung-over and ill. There is a sense of escape, but it does not last. Woman decides to cut with the old, just because she can.
She sets aside cash and vacation days, and on June 10, 2009, hires a surgeon to cut through inframammary skin via paid deposit securing operating room at 0800h on an August 18.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
I cannot say why, exactly, the woman would behave this way. Her mindset was clear on only some of its reasons. The woman was me, and also, she was a person I do not recognize. I cannot say she knew the direction of her footpath. I gather she cared less about where she went than about simply going anywhere that was hers.
French performance artist Orlan underwent nine plastic surgeries in the early 1990s in the name of carnal art. Orlan was anesthetized but conscious while her surgeons marked, injected, stretched, cut, and stitched the skin on her face to mimic, for instance, the forehead of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and the chin of Botticelli’s Venus. Orlan’s art is based not in body, but in its contravention. She sees the surgeries as “necessar[ily]” feminist, more interested in “questioning the status of the body” and the associated ethical dilemmas than in an aesthetic result.
I happened to be caught in a body myself, and I was interested in its dilemmas.
Case Study, 1.12. Woman meets for coffee with friend who made the CD mix, informing friend of the scheduled mammaplasty. Woman sips iced soy latte and asks about friend’s summer plans.
Babe, you are beautiful, just as you are. Woman believes this.
You don’t have to. Woman believes this. And feminism? Woman seeks neither the male nor the female gaze. Friend appears to feel pity. Following this, woman and friend discuss summer and hug goodbye.
What is the space between compulsion and choice?
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
After her coffee outing, the woman might have briefly reconsidered the surgery. She went through with it anyway, the agency more important than the decision itself.
Case Study, 1.13. Surgeon makes infra-mammary incision, sealing saline implants in skin. Woman awakes and wonders. Is this the ache of empowerment?
“What does it look like when the self fights itself?” Jamison asks, “When a human being is broken into warring factions?” Does it look like a half-lasered tattoo? An autoimmune disease or the denial of its diagnosis? Does it look like feminist’s plastic surgery? Or the immediate regret in its aftermath?
Case Study, 1.14. Post-operative. Woman reports red, raised, itchy scars. She says they are angry. Probable cause is trauma to subdermal layers. Patient had been prepped and draped in the usual sterile fashion, but had not seen the flowing skirts, the spinning fabric. Patient is advised to practice post-operative massage.
There is a video from my childhood that haunts me. It features me and my sister with two friends enacting a performance as young girls. We wear our respective mothers’ clothing, donning shirts that fall to the floor like gowns. Beneath our outfits, my sister and I wear what must be padded bras, recognizably our mother’s, for it was the type of undergarment she wore, the template for a structure she’d always dreamed of.
“The ideal woman,” writes Jia Tolentino, “always believes she came up with herself on her own.” But, despite a perceived singularity in skin, the organ is porous, less hermetic seal than conversant membrane. It could be seen to breathe along with the world around it, with “plants, brush, nettles, [and] ivy,” as Bhanu Kapil suggests, in dialogue with its surroundings. Skin is connective tissue, adjoining what would appear discrete: in it, spaces and tenses, histories and presents, residents and guests in dialogue collide.
After her coffee outing, the woman might have briefly reconsidered the surgery. She went through with it anyway, the agency more important than the decision itself.
En nuestra familia somos todas planas, my mother would say of a genetic flatness of chest. I had heard this before, as had she. From Aida, from Eloisa – this perhaps the only point the sisters could ever agree on. I wonder about the women who came before them. I wonder how someone first came to believe a three-dimensional body might be seen as flat, and how this came to have any import.
In other words, who wrote the first story? Who gave it meaning?
Stories in both word and skin are written atop stories by others, gesturing to voices that have framed the written tale. “Where do we belong?” Gay asks herself in her writing, and “how beholden are we to the places and people to whom we belong?” It was not my mother’s web, but also my mother’s mother’s, and her mother’s, and equally mine to inherit and own.
What if I refused the narrative or its claims to veracity? “There’s an idea that a successful narrative,” writes Cusk, “is one that gives you no choice,” but to suspend disbelief, “but mostly I imagine it’s a question of both sides conspiring to keep the suspension aloft.”
Case Study, 1.15. Woman cleans up her residence. She does some evicting. She invites some guests: there is movement and breath, more silence than freefall. How steady could she be? In the quiet of what is still, woman tunes out sound, beginning to listen for her own.
Perhaps, this was my place of first true residence; not the second skin I longed to wear as a child in Chile, but a place of true nativity.
Case Study, 1.16. Woman schedules breast explant surgery. Surgeon advises her to reconsider. But you would do better to replace with silicone! Woman wants only her skin back. No, she does not want a nip or a tuck. She declines general anesthesia. Surgeon is advised to open, remove and suture. Only.
Case Study, 1.17. Post-operative visit: Patient exhibits healthy scarring. New scars are at peace, at home in their skin as stretched.
To write a story of any verisimilitude is to inhabit the confounding place, of getting tattoos only to remove them, of expanding in skin only to contract in it, of cutting open to find a measure of healing.
Of fearing motherhood only to step into it.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
When I first learned I was pregnant, I was equal parts nausea and panic. I tried to picture myself as a mother but I could not wear the shape. The softness and folding strollers were forms that wouldn’t fit. I can’t wear the skin of a mother, reads a journal entry from that time. My mother interjected in consciousness with her I’ve never felt better than when I was pregnant; you grew out of me.
But the mass of cells multiplying inside of me – breathing my air, taking my iron, leaving the taste of licked coins in my mouth – was neither me nor would ever be mine, but rather, the beginnings of someone else, only briefly tethered to me by an umbilical lifeline. Could I stretch enough for the both of us? I could not see the way.
Twelve weeks into this time of visionlessness, I had a scheduled sonogram. The technician repositioned the trans-vaginal wand, adjusting uterine angles as if parking a car.
Do you see? She pointed at an image on the screen to my right. That’s how the vulva begins.
In that early fold, suddenly I could see. Whereas I hadn’t been sure about sharing the spaces beneath my skin, I was sure I could share its stories.
Case Study, 1.18. Woman goes into labor unexpectedly on November 11, 2019, under a moon that is full. She leaves her mother’s home, where she happened to be sleeping that night, and drives herself to the hospital. She labors mostly alone, on the bathroom floor, telling no one.
In the preceding weeks, I had been reading Rumi: ‘Every morning a new arrival,’ and here came a new story in skin.
I was alone on the bathroom floor, but with me was Simone’s bird in the sky, in my hand my mother’s, and her mother’s, and Aida’s, and the hands of women who came before that, as if a tapestry that, whether I liked it or not, helped catch my birthing child. My lower perineum ripped over my daughter’s head, and in my skin I was finally home.
If I had only known: that to find belonging in body, I merely needed to be in it. That this is something like peace.
My daughter was born with a bird cry and taken to my torso. She was born in a vernix coat, that sheath of shedding skin cells that safeguarded her in utero like a layer of wax over a wheel of cheese.
In her earliest moments, my daughter slid, by repeat turns of the cheek, up my chest in search of milk. She brushed her face past the once angry incision sites, past the placid ones, leaving smudges of vernix caked on my skin. Her mouth found a nipple and she latched, fed, then placed her cheek on my chest, resting, from the womb into this new membrane, into a world, hers, that was already spinning.
I reflect on my own narratives and those that I’ve held to be true in the permutations of skin I’ve lived in, and I can no more speak to commonality of entrapment than I can discern this essay’s meaning, for I don’t wish to make one. In a “scramble to make sense of nonsensical things,” Nelson writes, stories, those very things we are told give us meaning, “distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit, betray, mythologize, you name it.” I think of my daughter’s face in her earliest moments of life, damp and red and eyes-shut, a face that knew only of a search for milk and comfort in skin. And so I stop myself here, making neither meaning nor arc as I close my study. I task myself with Nelson’s narrative restraint, for if I can “make my language flat enough, exact enough, if I can rinse each sentence clean enough, I could tell you this story while walking out of this story,” leaving my daughter to know – conocer – her own.
The case study, I tell the Englishman, would be written for her.
Photo Credit: Valk Fisher, original image.
Valk Fisher is a Chilean-American writer whose work gravitates towards the body, culture, gender, and politics, often at points of intersection. Valk is a doctoral student in Creative Writing Doctorate at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is researching narratives of illness. She is a recent graduate of the University of Cambridge and lives in Lisbon, Portugal.