Perfect Book Pairing: All’s Well & The Invisible Kingdom
Chronic illnesses are on the rise, particularly autoimmune diseases, and in world where disconnection is the standard, books like these have a chance at helping us move toward healing. Because you can’t survive through hardship without a community and systems that see the hardship too and are willing to walk with you through the unknown, toward healing.
Yas Crawford. 2019. Oxygen Ib
“How are we doing? he’ll ask as I approach, but he’s already walking away from me toward the treatment room down the hall, my ever-fattening file tucked under his arm. Because he already know how I am. No better, never any better. One of those patients. One of those sad cartoon brains who wants to live under a smudgy sky of her own making. Who refuses to believe in little victories. A fire he’s been valiantly trying to put out, but then I constantly, brazenly, insist upon erupting into flames again.”
-All’s Well by Mona Awad
Miranda in Mona Awad’s novel All’s Well is stuck in a body of pain, in a world where people don’t believe in, and often don’t care about, her pain. Until, suddenly, in a surreal turn of events, someone does. Three someone’s. And her pain is lifted. And things get more surreal. To live with chronic pain is to be willing to do almost anything to rid yourself of the pain. This willingness comes, partly, from the world’s denial of your reality. Friends, family, doctors, insurance agencies—all of them seem to mistrust you and for those who believe you, their compassion and understanding run dry as nothing seems to help you. Miranda is at the bottom of that well at the beginning of All’s Well and I so wish I could have handed her a copy of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke and made her dinner while she read it.
Some of the pain that comes from living with a chronic illness and/or pain is the loneliness that accompanies it—particularly doctors and medical professionals—because, like O’Rourke writes, “How could I get better if no one thought I was sick?” She writes about ethical loneliness, which Miranda was most certainly experiencing and which drove her nearly mad. “Ethical loneliness,” according to O’Rourke, “is what happens when wrongs are compounded by going cruelly unacknowledged.”
This is why books like these two are crucial. Chronic illnesses are on the rise, particularly autoimmune diseases, and in world where disconnection is the standard, books like these have a chance at helping us move toward healing. Because you can’t survive through hardship without a community and systems that see the hardship too and are willing to walk with you through the unknown, toward healing.
“The central issue is that physicians tend not to see women’s self-reports of illness symptoms as valid. When a female patient complains of pain or discomfort, her testimony is viewed as a gendered expression of a subjective emotional issue rather than a reflection of a “hard” objective physiological reality. Even when it comes to a disease as grave as cancer, a woman’s testimony about what she is experiencing is seen as an exaggeration. You can guess what happens, then, when doctors cannot identify the source of the symptoms. One young woman I interviewed told me, “I wish doctors had just looked me in the eye and said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you. But I believe you. And one day we’ll figure it out.’ I would have had so much more confidence in that person. To have the arrogance to believe we know everything about everything! The number of physicians who said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just depressed’—well, it was so demaning.””
-The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke
On Narrow Paved Paths by Dorthe Nors
“Every day from the twelfth to the nineteenth, Alice went over to see Einar. He was lying in bed more often now, which made his feet easier to get at. She removed his socks and massaged his feet, lumpy as they were, because it felt so nice, she knew it did".”
—from “On Narrow Paved Paths” by Dorthe Nors in Wild Swims.
Waiting Tide by Carrie Swim
“Every day from the twelfth to the nineteenth, Alice went over to see Einar. He was lying in bed more often now, which made his feet easier to get at. She removed his socks and massaged his feet, lumpy as they were, because it felt so nice, she knew it did. As she sat there at the foot of Einar’s bed and talked about her father, who’d been a dentist, about her devoted years as a schoolteacher, about her deceased husband, and about her son, who’d been sweet as a child, her fingers were busy pinching and patting. The big tom that always hung about Einar was easy enough to shoo off the bed. Then it stalked up around the bed and glowered at Alice, while up on the bed she spoke of the future. “I for instance have my funeral completely sorted,” Alice told Einar, who floated in and out of a schnapps fog. “I know precisely which songs they’ll sing,” and Einar opened an eye with difficulty and said, “But I still have long to live.””
—from “On Narrow Paved Paths” by Dorthe Nors in Wild Swims.
The Four Seasons by Mavis Gallant
“Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater”
“Carmela had never been anywhere except her own village and this house, but Mrs. Unwin had no way of knowing that. She pressed a cracked black change purse in Carmela’s hand and sent her down the hill to the local market to fetch carrots and not over a pound of the cheapest stewing beef. Carmela saw walled villas, and a clinic with a windbreak of cypress trees and ocher walls and black licorice balconies. Near the short, work had stopped on some new houses. One could look through them, where windows were still holes in the walls, and catch a glimpse of the sea. She heard someone comment in an Italian more precious than her own, “Hideous. I hope they fall down on top of the builder. Unwin put money in it, too, but he’s bankrupt.” The woman who made these remarks was sitting under the pale blue awning of a café so splendid that Carmela felt bound to look the other way. She caught, like her flash of the sea, small round tables and colored ices in silver dishes. All at once she recognized a chauffeur in uniform leaning with his back to a speckless motorcar. He was from Castel Vittorio. He gave no sign that he knew Carmela. Her real life was beginning now, and she never doubted its meaning. Among the powerful and strange she would be mute and watchful. She would swim like a little fish, and learn to breathe underwater.”
—from “The Four Seasons” by Mavis Gallant in The Collected Stories.
Pair with this audio documentary with Mavis Gallant from CBC. A true delight. Like colored ices, that do indeed come back around.
The Short Story — Deep Work, Patience, + Meditation
“…the only remedy is to resolutely abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.”
In reading Edith Wharton’s The Writing of Fiction, it became clear that she calls, again and again, for the short story writer to think deeply on their story, to be patient with it, to meditate on the subject, form, style, and characters before launching into its telling. The short story requires the writer to know the story inside and out, to know exactly how and why it must be told. The way she writes about it, Wharton seems to see the short story as an act of meditation and deep work, not just on the story being told, but on the person telling it. As she writes early in the book: “One good heart-break will furnish the poet with many songs, and the novelist with a considerable number of novels. But they must have hearts that can break.” And how can we have hearts without deep thought, reflection, and the patience to live the life set before us?
"True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. … Vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer’s own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience.”
“…the only remedy is to resolutely abandon the larger for the smaller field, to narrow one’s vision to one’s pencil, and do the small thing closely and deeply rather than the big thing loosely and superficially.”
“The short-story writer must not only know from what angle to present his anecdote if it is to give out all its fires, but must understand just why that particular angle and no other is the right one. He must therefore have turned his subject over and over, walked around it, so to speak…”
“The precious instinct of selection is distilled by that long patience which, if it be not genius, must be one of the genius’s chief reliances in communicating itself.”
“Nothing but deep familiarity with his subject will protect the short-story writer from another danger: that of contenting himself with a mere sketch of the episode selected.”
“True economy consists in the drawing out of one’s subject of every drop of significance it can give, true expenditure in devoting time, meditation and patient labour to the process of extraction and representation.”
Quotes from The Writing of Fiction by Edith Wharton. I highly recommend pairing this book with the George Saunders episode of the podcast In Writing with Hattie Crisell.
Three Stories
“Another admirer. How their ranks swelled. They could erect a monument to her in the town square. An extremely fucking likeable woman — that’s what the plaque could say.”
Madame Bovary, 2012 by Peter Wüthrich
“I’ve told them the stories of their births many times, but at some point something shifted; they began to insist on making me the hero of these tales, rather than them. Now what they want to hear is how hard I needed to work to push them out, how I refused any pain medication because I wanted to be able to stand and walk and writhe however necessary to help them through the birth passage. They want to hear, again, how great the pain was that I had prevailed over—can I describe it? To what can it be compared? What they like, it seems to me, is to hear what an act of terrible strength it took to push them into the world, and that I, their mother, was capable of it. Or maybe what they want is to celebrate, again, the old and fading order of things, where they are not called on to protect, but are themselves watched over and protected.”
—Nicole Krauss, “To Be a Man” in The Atlantic
“Another admirer. How their ranks swelled. They could erect a monument to her in the town square. An extremely fucking likeable woman — that’s what the plaque could say.”
—Erin Somers, “Ten Year Affair” in Joyland
“No sign of him. This is not living, she thought. Waiting for a solution that never comes is not living. I know he’s getting tired of me. Why doesn’t he come? It doesn’t even matter if he doesn’t love me. As long as he’s here.”
—Pauline Melville, “Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary Discuss Their Suicides” in Electric Lit
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans
Usually, Eva thought of herself as a good person. She stayed up at night worrying about the human condition in vague and specific incarnations. She made herself available to the people whom she loved, and s0me whom she didn’t. She gave money to every other homeless person and stopped to let stray kids remind her how much Jesus and the Hare Krishnas loved her, more for the benefit of their souls than hers. Still she wondered sometimes if it wasn’t all pretense—if, when she shut her eyes and wished restitution upon the whole wounded parade of humanity, she wasn’t really wishing away the world that created war and illness so that she might have a world in which there was room to feel sorry for herself. Every day she felt herself losing things it was unacceptable to mourn.
-Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self