Perfect Book Pairing: All’s Well & The Invisible Kingdom
“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
