When Illness Makes You Into a New Person

One hundred years ago, Virginia Woolf wondered why, “considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings,” it had not “taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” In the century since, Woolf’s provocation has been met many times over—in works as varied as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and John Green’s YA best seller The Fault in Our Stars. More recently, books such as Lisa Olstein’s Pain Studies and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom have examined the uncertainty of chronic illness. What does another entry into the canon of sickness writing have to offer readers?

Woolf wrote in “On Being Ill” that “it is to the poets that we turn” when “illness makes us disinclined for