![]() ![]() ![]() “My diagnosis had been discussed in almost every major medical journal,” she tells us with an air of pride and exhausted wonder, “including the New England Journal of Medicine, and The New York Times.” One thing you don’t want to be to your doctor is “an interesting case.” Susannah Cahalan had the bad luck of being a unique and baffling one: profoundly sick, deteriorating with dangerous speed, yet her MRIs, brain scans and blood tests were normal. But what hard-won nugget of wisdom has she brought back from her brief descent into a hell that most of us, for now, have been lucky enough to avoid? Can she give her ordeal meaning beyond the brute fact of the thing itself? ![]() There is little suspense: the existence of the memoir is testament to the fact that the author has lived to tell the tale. Severe illness, by its nature, narrows the focus the palette of experience both intensifies and shrinks we crawl into the bush, figuratively speaking, and wait out our fate, fighting to survive. ![]() The reader’s resistance to these stories can be strong. From a literary point of view, everything depends on the sensibility of the narrator, her comportment both as the teller and as the main character in her own tale. In the vast and growing literature of affliction there is essentially one story: how the writer and her loved ones made it through. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |