What’s the Point of Illness Memoirs? A Review

I read an article that is part reflection on the cultural or philosophical purpose of illness memoirs and part review of What Doesn’t Kill You: A Life With Chronic Illness by Tessa Millerby. The article, “The Consolation of the Illness Memoir” by Anna Altman at The New Republic, caught my attention as the author of an illness memoir. Some intriguing quotes from the article:

• “They each have to navigate an extortionate, elaborate, and emotionally draining private health care system. Miller connects her own experience to the American health care industry as a whole, from a several-billion-dollar wellness industry peddling dubious cures and therapies to a medical system in which doctors typically give their patients 11 seconds to explain their symptoms before they interrupt them.”
• “‘Chronically ill people grieve two versions of ourselves: The people we were before we got sick and the future, healthy versions that don’t exist (or, at least, look much different from what we’d imagined),’ [Miller] writes. She introduces the idea of ‘ambiguous loss’ a type of grief that arises when there is no clear outcome. That ambiguity, Miller acknowledges, can prevent resolution.”
• “Whether because there are so many different diseases and conditions without a unifying experience, or due to our inability to truly understand another body’s experience of pain, the fact that millions of people in the United States live with chronic illness, many of them invisible, remains opaque in our cultural imagination.”

The article’s author notes that she has chronic migraine. Even if illness memoirs so far have failed to revolutionize American health care and cultural treatment of people with chronic illnesses, I believe the books are well worth writing and reading, for the benefit of patients and those closest enough to them to truly listen. Have you written one? If so, let me know, and I'll read it!

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Darla Nagel is a biomedical copy editor who has an invisible chronic illness. She wants to educate healthcare professionals and encourage patients. If you want to receive quarterly updates from her, email darla.nagel{a}gmail.com.