As a woman who suffers from chronic illness, I am interested in sharing my experience and learning about other women who also suffer and survive their chronic conditions. I have had endometriosis, a painful disease, since I was a teenager. I’ve always enjoyed stories about different kinds of chronic illnesses, and I appreciate the way pain and sickness can be translated into memorable books.
Although I may be biased in recommending my former mentor’s book, this memoir about Khakpour’s experience with mysterious illnesses and addictions is a must read.
Written in sharp, often poetic prose, the author offers an intimate portrait of a chronically ill woman of color navigating the frustrating world of doctors, tests, theories, medications, and doubt. The reader is pulled into this dark, gritty story of benzodiazepine abuse, debilitating symptoms, economic hardship, and, ultimately, diagnosis.
I love every book ever written by Khakpour, however, Sick is my absolute favorite (so far!) Not only could I relate to her experience in many ways, I adore her willingness to share all the messy, difficult pieces of her life.
A Best Book of the Year: Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, The Paris Reivew, and LitHub.
Time Magazine's Best Memoirs of 2018 • Boston Globe's 25 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018 • Buzzfeed's 33 Most Exciting New Books • GQ Best Non Fiction Book of 2018 • Bustle’s 28 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2018 list • Nylon’s 50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018 • Electric Literature’s 46 Books to Read By Women of Color in 2018
“Porochista Khakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love…
A candid often comical memoir about finding love and coming to terms with illness, Martin doesn’t shy away from the unflattering bits of looking for your soul mate while also dealing with the complications of MS.
Self-deprecating humor, unflinching depictions of award sexual encounters and unfortunate side effects (the chapter "Shit Happens has some quality toilet humor), this book will make you laugh out loud, which, in my opinion, makes this an exceptional memoir about chronic illness.
At 28, Cory Martin thought she had it all, a budding career as a writer in Hollywood, an apartment of her own, and a healthy obsession with yoga. But when she found herself on the floor of her apartment wailing into the phone, 'but I don't want to be sick, ' her entire world came crashing down.
A doctor had just revealed that she had Multiple Sclerosis, a potentially debilitating disease, her good friend was getting married that weekend and the only people she wanted to call were her parents. In a time when she was supposed to be coming…
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
Huber is an author and teacher whom I adore, and I am lucky enough to call friend and mentor, but her writing will make everyone fall in love with her.
Heartfelt, lyrical, brutally honest, and funny, this collection of essays will give you new insight into what it means to live in chronic pain. She writes in a way that makes illness and pain itself almost beautiful. If you want poetic writing, a compelling narrative, and an experimental approach to understanding the pain that is an inextricable part of life for some of us, this book is for you.
Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays about living with chronic pain. Sonya Huber moves away from a linear narrative to step through the doorway into pain itself, into that strange, unbounded reality. Although the essays are personal in nature, this collection is…
O’Rourke blends personal anecdotes, meticulous research, and compelling conviction as she argues that how we treat chronic illness needs to change.
She unpacks the complex nature of autoimmune conditions offering the history of Western Medicine’s approach to illness and even shedding a light on why so many sick people are often left without definitive diagnoses or helpful treatment plans. This is a multi-dimensional portrait of autoimmune disease and chronic illness that I could not put down.
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
A “best of books about chronic illness list” would not be complete without Gay’s heartbreaking memoir.
The bestselling author delves into chronic overeating, PTSD from a trauma she suffered as a young girl, and a complicated relationship with her overweight body. This book is both devastating and devastatingly beautiful. She explores her history with food as a Haitian-American woman as well as society’s expectations of women and women’s bodies. Gay is a true warrior, and she writes her story with guts.
Trigger Warning: this book contains explicit depictions of sexual violence.
From Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a memoir in weight about eating healthier, finding a tolerable form of exercise, and exploring what it means to learn, in the middle of your life, how to take care of yourself and how to feed your hunger.
New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption,…
In this powerful debut, Rebecca Dimyan details her experience with endometriosis, a chronic disease that affects one in ten women worldwide. This painful condition takes an average of seven years to be diagnosed and has no proven cure.
With honesty, vulnerability, and sometimes humor, Dimyan explores the ways the condition has impacted her experiences, her body, her pain, and her joy. She takes her audience on an emotional journey through her teenage years, early twenties, and into her thirties as she becomes a professional woman, wife, and mother. Dimyan blends research, anecdotes, and advice as she shares the relief she’s found through alternative treatments and holistic medicine.
