Reading List
Meghan O’Rourke
Poet & Essayist
Meghan O’Rourke is an American poet, essayist and critic. She began as an editor at The New Yorker, was culture and literary editor at Slate, served as a poetry co-editor of The Paris Review, and became editor of The Yale Review in 2019. Her books include three collections of poems, The Long Goodbye, a memoir of grief after her mother’s death, and The Invisible Kingdom, an account of chronic illness that was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
The Cure Within
A History of Mind-Body Medicine
by Anne Harrington · History
“A fascinating look at how we think about the interconnection of the mind and the body. Harrington, a historian, recounts the many irrational and enduring cultural stories we tell about being ennobled by our suffering.” — via Article, December 2022
Memorial Drive
A Daughter's Memoir
by Natasha Trethewey · Memoir
“This searing memoir by a former poet laureate is about writing of trauma that resists language and is hard to see clearly. It tells the story of the murder of Trethewey's mother by her abusive ex-husband, and is a model for writing authentically about uncertainty and that which we can never fully know.” — via Article, December 2022
On Being Ill
With Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen
by Virginia Woolf, Julia Stephen · 2012 · Classics
“Woolf is the master of writing about inner sensation. In this book-length essay, she pointedly notes that we have very little good writing about pain, and lays out the "poverty" of the English language when it comes to describing the body. We can't see what we don't have words for.” — via Article, December 2022
In the Land of Pain
by Alphonse Daudet · 2016 · Memoir
“A collection of fragments, it amounts, in a sense, to an eloquent existential outcry. This book articulated more about being ill than almost anything else I've read.” — via Article, December 2022
The Pain Chronicles
Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering
by Melanie Thernstrom · Nonfiction
“In this hybrid of memoir and research, Thernstrom braids her own story of chronic pain with literary and historical accounts of pain, and incisively lays out how little we understand about chronic pain. I will never forget her riveting accounts of surgery before pain medications and anesthesia.” — via Article, December 2022
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
by Susan Sontag · 2001 · Essays
“In this brief, startlingly original, and audacious essay, Sontag argued that we often psychologize and stigmatize illnesses that are poorly understood.” — via Article, December 2022
