| May 2022 | Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick
An intrepid, galvanising meditation on illness, disability, feminism, and what it means to be alive. Hattrick blends memoir, medical history, biography, and literature review to uncover untold case histories of medically unexplained and invisible illness, with a focus on ME and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, alongside other related chronic illnesses. In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary non-fiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Suffused with a generative, transcendent rage, Alice Hattrick’s genre-bending debut is a moving and defiant exploration of life with a medically unexplained illness. Read more here. |
