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The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Health
- The Guardian
Pathemata by Maggie Nelson review – a writer's attempt to describe chronic pain
In her landmark 1985 work, The Body in Pain, American essayist Elaine Scarry makes a case for the 'unsharability' of pain and its resistance to language. 'Physical pain,' she writes, 'does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.' Sixty years earlier in On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf made her famous claim about how language 'runs dry' when it comes to articulating illness. Both theories grapple with inexpressibility. Experiencing serious, persistent pain invokes many feelings: irritation, curiosity (what's causing it?), fear (of something sinister) and ultimately the desire to eradicate it. The search for a diagnosis can be as debilitating as the condition itself. In Pathemata: Or, the Story of My Mouth, Maggie Nelson tries to solve the mystery of a longstanding health issue. 'Each morning, it is as if my mouth has survived a war – it has protested, it has hidden, it has suffered.' Nelson breadcrumbs backwards through teenage orthodontist visits, recurrent battles with tonsillitis and 'tongue thrust' in an attempt to find the source of the problem. She diligently keeps records of appointments, medications and scans, lugging files between GPs and several dentists whose waiting rooms show slick testimonial videos. Written during the pandemic, this short work is also testament to the apocalyptic uncertainty that infused that time. Her partner is in a separate support bubble and Nelson makes several attempts to get their son vaccinated, her frustration palpable. When the child complains about her anger, she confesses: 'I have never felt as angry as I've felt over the past two years.' The locus of Pathemata (ancient Greek for 'sufferings') may be pain and the pandemic, but Nelson has never been a single-subject writer, even in books that professed to be singular, such as Jane: A Murder (the death of her aunt) or Bluets (the colour blue). In this thoughtful work, she excavates the duties of parenthood and care, bodies and ageing, loneliness and mortality. The narrative jumps in time, and the lines between reality, dreams and fiction blur. Pain is as individual as a fingerprint, and yet Nelson wonders why 'some people with bites more fucked up than mine have no pain, just like two people could have identical back MRIs but one can't get out of bed and the other does CrossFit'. It is not lost on her that the mouth has a symbolic role in the life of the writer: someone whose job revolves round words, while the pain itself remains unamenable to language. Mandatory face covering during Covid brings a realisation of how many emotions are expressed with the mouth. Its visibility means it becomes a site of art: the rapidly moving lips of Beckett's Not I or The Scream by Munch. Nelson succumbs to the Covid routines of doomscrolling the news and watching beloved TV shows, but in the midst of social isolation, there is loneliness at home, too. Her partner eventually returns to the house and 'each activity – popcorn popping, the clatter of violence on Netflix – floats into my bedroom – our bedroom – like a fresh abandonment'. The pandemic's forced confinement also means that she has to say goodbye to a dying friend by phone. Heartbroken, she can't stop hearing her friend's voice saying her name. 'No one will ever say my name like that again – no lover, no parent, no husband, no friend. The way she knew me died with her; from now on, I will be less loved, less known.' In the search for answers, Nelson reads articles about how the pandemic has killed coincidence and moments of surprise. She feels that 'magic is seeping out of my life'. Understandable in a time of enforced lockdowns, but there is a palpable link to getting older; that there is less time ahead than behind. Nelson's work never does self-pity and she admits that this failure to summon magic 'is uniquely my own'. Nostalgia was a balm for many during Covid, and amid the possibility of a future full of fear, Nelson recalls her school days, her thesis on Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and a beloved feminist theory teacher. Structured in short paragraphs, the narrative repeatedly circles back to the implications and consequences of pain, and the disruption it causes. 'Sometimes I wonder what I would have thought about all these years, if I hadn't spent so much time thinking about the pain. Then I remember that I thought about a lot of other things as well.' For Nelson, a life of pain must coexist alongside the other roles she inhabits: of mother, teacher, lover. The book's full title comes from a phrase in ancient Greek meaning 'learning through suffering', which is not as simple as solving what Nelson calls 'the pain puzzle'. The pain endured by martyrs and saints suggests penance or ecstasy, but Nelson is neither religious nor seeking absolution. In trying to untangle the problem of her own pain and her experience of disconnection, she invites us to reflect on ours. In outlining her suffering, she prompts us to imagine our own. The singular as metaphor for the collective, urging us to fully inhabit the lives we have, in spite of bodily interruptions, or global distractions. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Pathemata or, the Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson is published by Fern (£12.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Atlantic
07-02-2025
- Health
- Atlantic
A New Kind of ‘Illness Realism'
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors' weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here. Illness and literature have frequently been bedfellows. Tuberculosis, for example, shortened the life and influenced the work of authors as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, and the Brontë sisters. We can't know what In Search of Lost Time would have looked like if a variety of ailments had not left Marcel Proust in his bed during his youth. To infer that sickness begets literature would be misleading—perhaps even dangerous. But once in a while, it forces a writer to undergo a radical artistic transformation—one so serious that they might reconsider what books can do. First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic 's Books section: This week, Hillary Kelly wrote for The Atlantic about a visit with Hanif Kureishi, the award-winning British author who, in 2022, at age 68, began to feel faint and lost consciousness. When he awoke in a hospital, he learned that he had broken his neck, and was paraplegic. Kureishi was already well established before his debilitating injury. In fact, he confessed to Kelly, he believes success had made him too comfortable. 'I was happy having a good life,' he said. 'I thought, Fuck it. Why should I spend all day working? … I didn't have much of a desire to write anymore.' But after his fall, beginning in his first days in the hospital, Kureishi started to write furiously. A flurry of social-media posts earned him sympathy and admiration for his truth-telling. Over two years of immobility and constant care, that intensity has not abated. A new book, Shattered, collects essays from his first year. In defining what's new about the book's 'illness realism,' Kelly draws on Virginia Woolf, another writer who faced serious health challenges. In On Being Ill, Woolf wrote that 'things are said, truths blurted out' on the sickbed 'which the cautious respectability of health conceals.' Kureishi, Kelly writes, conveys these truths unvarnished: 'He has no distance from himself or his condition, and refuses to add any.' Kureishi told Kelly that he hasn't been able to read since his fall; he hasn't even read his own book. Last week in The Atlantic, Kristen Martin wrote about another unusual memoir that presents a very different example of how a health emergency can rewire an author's work. Sarah Chihaya's Bibliophobia is, Martin writes, 'an account of how her reliance on books played a major role in a crisis, leading her, for a time, to fear them.' In 2019, after a lifetime of devoted reading, Chihaya was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, after which she found herself unable to read (or to write the book that would secure her tenure as a Princeton professor). What eventually helped her emerge—and to write this memoir—was a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, which provided 'a new plot for her life, based in reality rather than fiction.' Writing—of a new, almost unbearably honest kind—seemed to have helped both of these authors communicate intensely isolating experiences to readers. For the ill person, Woolf wrote, 'the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.' Yet that seascape, too, belongs to life; most readers find themselves there at some point. And an author may teach them how to navigate the tides. Hanif Kureishi's Relentlessly Revealing Memoir By Hillary Kelly How a tragic accident helped the author find his rebellious voice again What to Read To Name the Bigger Lie, by Sarah Viren At first, To Name the Bigger Lie seems like a straightforward coming-of-age story. As a high-school student in 1990s Tampa, Florida, Viren falls under the sway of her charismatic teacher Dr. Whiles, who is intent on pushing his students to question the nature of the truth. His pedagogy involves exposing his class, often uncritically, to conspiracy theories that include Holocaust denialism. Years later, in 2016, Viren sets out to write a book that treats that period in her life as an allegory for the rise of fascism in the United States. But, partway through the writing, her wife—an academic, like Viren—is falsely accused of sexual harassment, and the ensuing Title IX investigation becomes part of Viren's narrative. The surprising convergences that Viren finds between the case and Dr. Whiles's teaching—both of which turn out to be fraught, harmful ways of trying to access the truth—culminate in a chilling interrogation of the fact-finding methods that our institutions rely on. — Tajja Isen Out Next Week 📚 You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip, by Kelsey McKinney 📚 Loca, by Alejandro Heredia 📚 Blood Ties, by Jo Nesbø Your Weekend Read The Dictatorship of the Engineer By Franklin Foer Despite this history of failure, Americans haven't shaken the hope that some benevolent, hyperrational leader, immune to the temptations of political power, will step in to redesign the nation, to solve the problems that politicians can't. That hope is unbreakable, because American culture invests engineers with the aura of wizardry. This is true for Elon Musk. For years, the media glorified him as a magician who harnessed the power of the sun, who revived the American space program, who rescued the electric car. Given that hagiographic press, some of it deserved, he could easily believe in his own ability to fix the American government—and think that a large chunk of the nation would believe that, too. When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
