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Ill Feelings
Ill Feelings | ALICE. HATTRICK
2 posts | 2 read | 3 to read
Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary non-fiction to uncover untold case histories of medically unexplained and invisible illness. In 1995 Alice's mother collapsed with pneumonia. Her lungs were infected, which caused flu-like symptoms: fatigue, chest pain, fever. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Her symptoms mirrored her mother's and appeared to have no physical cause; she received the same diagnosis a few years later. Since this time, neither of them have been well, even if, at times, they believed they were well-enough. Structured around the narrative of the author and her mother's own ill feelings. Alice Hattrick's collective biography of illness branches out into the records of ill health women have written about in diaries and letters. Her cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, Ruskin's lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Ill Feelings is a moving and defiant debut from a bold new voice in narrative non-fiction which inhabits a similar space to Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams and Emilie Pine's Notes to Self, but has a texture and voice - a generative, transcendent rage - of its own.
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tenar
Ill Feelings | ALICE. HATTRICK
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Pickpick

Ill Feelings is part illness memoir, part diary of famous women‘s illnesses, part investigation into the medical controversy around chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS).

It‘s messy, circular, ruminating. It‘s also the first thing to ever move me to write for myself about my own illness. It put words to things I haven‘t known how to, those words coming not only from Hattrick, but across time, from Elizabeth B. Browning, from Virginia Woolf. Magical.

EvieBee Intriguing! I have to read this! I don‘t stack here but just know that I‘m buying. 2y
tenar @EvieBee Thanks for leaving the comment! ❤️ I‘m at a weird place with this book in that I don‘t think I‘d recommend it to every reader, but at the same time I want everyone to read it. I hope you take something meaningful from it! 2y
EvieBee I know exactly what you mean. 🤗 2y
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review
keepingupwiththepenguins
Ill Feelings | ALICE. HATTRICK
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Mehso-so

I loved Hattrick‘s insight and ideas in Ill Feelings. I was hoping, though, for more of a case study format, which might have made it easier to follow. I‘ll admit I embraced the skim for some dense sections of medical jargon. Ill Feelings is not an easy read, but it‘s an interesting and worthwhile one for anyone interested in the intersection of gender and disability. Full review: https://keepingupwiththepenguins.com/new-releases/

46 likes2 stack adds