Ill Feelings

An intrepid, galvanizing meditation on illness, disability, feminism, and what it means to be alive.In 1995 Alices mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mothers and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later.Ill Feelingsblends memoir, medical history, biography and literary nonfiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskins lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Suffused with a generative, transcendent rage, Alice Hattricks genre-bending debut is a moving and defiant exploration of life with a medically unexplained illness.