I've been thinking recently about what books I read when I first got ill. I didn't read about illness, I simply read what I was already reading: novels. I struggled to read French, my huge dictionary clunked beside me in bed, I was trying to hang onto myself, the person I was. I never finished
Voyage au bout de la nuit, it's still on my shelves. I persevered and persevered with
Midnight's Children. My copy is yellowed now and I cannot open it or smell it without remembering being very ill. And yet it's one of my favourite books.
The only book on ME I had was Dr Melvin Ramsay's slim
The Saga of Royal Free Disease (1986) - it is still my bible
. I had a couple of 'self-help' books by Drs Anne MacIntyre and Charles Shepherd, but that was not 'til the early nineties - I can't recall exactly (I gave one to a boyfriend, I still have one on my shelf). It was in the nineties that I actually read most illness books, a good few years after getting ill. I borrowed from an American friend (and still have it, I'm a bad person) Norman Cousins'
Anatomy of an Illness (1979) - he used intravenous vitamin C, a treatment I'd also tried with positive results. In a more spiritual phase, I bought a book called
The Alchemy of Illness (1993) by Kat Duff. My brother sent me
Osler's Web (1996), which I still dip into and refer to. And I still love and dip into Susan Sontag's
Illness as Metaphor (1978) - who doesn't?
These days, when diagnosed with an illness - any illness - you have a treasure chest of books to try - self-help and memoir - not to mention the stories, some gems, that the internet can unearth. Naturally, you devour this information, you need to know exactly what has punched into your life, derailed you. You are sustained by others' narratives. You need reassurance; you need confirmation (certainly in the case of ME, so great has our fear been of not being believed). Of course, the quality of all of these shared narratives - online and off - varies greatly. There have been one or two ME 'self-help' books I couldn't get to the charity shop quickly enough.
The misery/illness memoir really took off in mid-late nineties and by the time I was writing about my own illness the genre had - in my opinion - been done to death so I veered as far away from it as I could. This
did not stop some editors from trying to pigeonhole my novel as 'sicklit'.
There are, I think, many more works of fiction on mental illness than physical illness. Perhaps mentally ill characters are seen as more interesting, they are more likely to behave 'badly' (if you are physically ill for a long time you are dull and boring, not taking part. Or you die.). I did read Helen Garner's novel
The Spare Room (2008) - about friendship and cancer - I enjoyed it but didn't think it lived up to the hype (the ill character also has intravenous vitamin C, and she is definitely not dull).
Now, when I read about illness (non-fiction), I want to read about other things, not just the illness. Last year, I loved Elisabeth Tova Bailey's
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, it is very much about other things. And I'm currently reading
The Vagabond's Breakfast by Richard Gwyn,
I saw Me and My Big Mouth review it. I don't always share Scott's taste in books - he hates
Midnight's Children! - but I'm very much enjoying this. It is about other things.
And the writing has to engage me, always the writing.
What I am trying to say is that when you are ill in a life-changing way - and you have stopped being stunned by the event - you will probably
hunger for illness narratives; but, later, you simply don't need or want them (unless they stretch out beyond the illness and tell you about the world). I know that people who are not ill will see things differently. The world of illness is new to them, unusual and strange.
***A lovely quote from Kat Duff, which I just found underlined in green pen (can't help wondering how long ago I did this and why green pen):
... Frankly, from the point of view of illness, healthy people seem ridiculous, even a touch dangerous, in their blinded busyness, marching like soldiers to the drumbeat of duty and desire.